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The Robot Economy: Interview with Alan Manning
SPARC
27 Sep 2016
In today’s interview, we sat down with Alan Manning, Professor of Labour Economics at the London School of Economics. He is a leading author in his field, particularly in understanding the imperfect...
Robocar parking is incredibly cheap
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
27 Sep 2016
Some people have wondered about my forecast in the spreadsheet on robotaxi economics about the very low parking costs I have predicted. I wrote about most of the reasons for this in my 2007 essay on R...
Critique of NHTSA’s newly released regulations
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
22 Sep 2016
The long awaited list of recommendations and potential regulations for robocars has just been released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that regulates ...
Robocar recap: Tesla radar, MobilEye fight, and the Comma One $1,000 add-on-box
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
20 Sep 2016
Tesla’s spat with MobilEye reached a new pitch this week with Tesla announcing a new release of their autopilot and plans. As reported earlier, MobilEye announced during the summer that they would n...
What artificial intelligence will look like in 2030
Leah Burrows and Harvard SEAS
16 Sep 2016
Artificial intelligence (AI) has already transformed our lives — from the autonomous cars on the roads to the robotic vacuums and smart thermostats in our homes. Over the next 15 years, AI technolog...
Breaking down robotaxi economics
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
14 Sep 2016
The vision of many of us for robocars is a world of less private car ownership and more use of robotaxis — on-demand ride service in a robocar. That’s what companies like Uber clearly are pushing ...
Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics
Kassie Perlongo
13 Sep 2016
The Olympics in Rio may be over, but athletes around the world are gearing up for a new type of competition. Cybathlon, known as the cyborg Olympics, coming up on 8 October in the SWISS Arena in Klote...
Cybathlon: A bionics competition for people with disabilities
Robert Riener
06 Sep 2016
Millions of people worldwide rely on orthotics, prosthetics, wheelchairs and other assistive devices to improve their quality of life. In the United States alone, there are more than 1.6 million peopl...
From flying shuttles to rolling robots, automated supply chains are almost here
Wolfgang Lehmacher
02 Sep 2016
From Amazon’s delivery drones to self-driving cars, autonomous factory equipment to Elon Musk’s 760 mph vacuum tubes – automated vehicles are on the rise.
Even beyond the grounds of pri...
Taking measure of artificial intelligence and the Turing Test
Jibo
31 Aug 2016
As far as party games go, the Imitation Game is a pretty clever and fairly entertaining one. A man and a women answer questions as if they were the other, trying to fool party guests into guessing the...
Regulations on civilian drones in the US and Europe, what do they involve?
Silvio Hänsenberger and Isabelle Wildhaber
31 Aug 2016
With new markets on the horizon, regulations governing civilian drones are currently being adapted in Europe and the US. What will these new regulations entail? And how well will they protect people a...
The Robot Economy: Interview with Alan Winfield
SPARC
24 Aug 2016
Robots and their impact on the economy is on the forefront of everyone’s mind. Will robots increase productivity and jobs, improve society, and will wealth be shared? To address this question, we’...
Robocar recap: Uber buys Otto, folks leave Google, Ford goes big, Tesla drops MobilEye
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
23 Aug 2016
Brad Templeton, from Robocars.com, discusses the latest robocar related news....
50 different state regulations for robocars is not a bad idea
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 Aug 2016
At the recent AUVSI/TRB conference in San Francisco, there was talk of upcoming regulation, particularly from NHTSA. Secretary of Transportation Foxx and his NHTSA staff spoke with just vague hints ab...
Will robocars be heaven or hell for our cities?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Aug 2016
Robin Chase wrote an article wondering if robocars will improve or ruin our cities and asked for my comment on it. It’s a long article, and I have lots of comment, since I have been considering thes...
Survey: Evaluate ethics of health related privacy with care robots
Dieter Vanderelst and Jurgen Willems
12 Aug 2016
Future Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) should be safe, but patients also have a right to privacy, liberty and social contact. The survey investigates, in a hypothetical scenario, how Annie's SAR s...
Robocar platooning, or just carpool?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
12 Aug 2016
At the recent AUVSI/TRB symposium, a popular research topic was platooning for robocars and trucks. Platooning is perhaps the oldest practical proposal when it comes to car automation because you can ...
The dark side of ethical robots
Alan Winfield
09 Aug 2016
When I was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2014, Justin Webb's final question was, "If you can make an ethical robot, doesn't that mean you could make an unethical robot?" The ans...
Tesla’s Master Plan, Part Deux: Some expected, some strange
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
26 Jul 2016
Today, I want to look at some implications of Tesla’s Master Plan, Part Deux which caused some buzz this week. There was other news, of course, including the AUVSI/TRB meeting which I attended, and ...
How science can help us make AI more trustworthy
Simone Stumpf
22 Jul 2016
Stories about racist Twitter accounts and crashing self-driving cars can make us think that artificial intelligence (AI) is a work in progress. But while these headline-grabbing mistakes reveal the fr...
Robots for a sustainable future
Jibo
15 Jul 2016
Climate change is one of the greatest issues facing the world today. With temperatures rising to their highest point in 4,000 years due to human activity and monthly average carbon dioxide levels exce...
Carpool apps are on the rise, let’s make transfer points and roads to help
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Jul 2016
The cell phone ride hail apps like Uber and Lyft are now reporting great success with actual ride-sharing, under the names UberPool, LyftLines and Lyft Carpool. In addition, a whole new raft of apps t...
Relax, we’re not living in a computer simulation
Alan Winfield
13 Jul 2016
Ever since Elon Musk's recent admission that he's a simulationist, several people have asked me what I think of the proposition that we are living inside a simulation. My view is very firmly that the...
Understanding the massive gulf between the Tesla Autopilot and a real robocar, in light of the crash
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
11 Jul 2016
Brad Templeton describes Tesla’s Autopilot as a 'distant cousin of a real robocar' that primarily uses a MobilEye EyeQ3 camera combined with radars and ultrasonic sensors. Unlike robocar sensors, T...
Starship delivery robots getting ready to deliver in London, Germany, Bern
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
07 Jul 2016
At Starship, we announced our first pilot projects for robotic delivery which will begin operating this summer. We’ll be working with a London food delivery startup Pronto as well as German parcel c...
Should Tesla disable your Autopilot if you’re not diligent? Plus, a survey of robocar validation
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
06 Jul 2016
In this article, Brad Templeton provides a rundown of different approaches for validation of self-driving and driver assist systems, a recommendation to Tesla and others to have countermeasures to det...
Man dies while driven by Tesla Autopilot
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
30 Jun 2016
A Tesla blog post describes the first fatality involving a self drive system. A Tesla was driving on autopilot down a divided highway. For unknown reasons, a truck crossed the highway (something m...
Designing simple, cheap cars of the future
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
17 Jun 2016
What does that car of the future look like? There is no one answer; in this world, the car that is sent to pick you up can be tailored for your trip. The more people traveling, the bigger the car. If ...
Caring for robots: How assistive robotics may change our homes
Benjamin Lipp
15 Jun 2016
Who will care for us in the future? According to many politicians, scientists and market analysts, it could be machines. Machines that will change our diapers, and spend time with us once we are old....
Letting policymakers handle the trolley problem
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
10 Jun 2016
When I give talks on robocars the most common question asked is the one known as the “trolley problem” question. That is: “what will the car do if it has to choose between killing one person or ...
How much can customers test robocars?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
07 Jun 2016
Reports from Tesla suggest they are gathering massive amounts of driving data from logs in their cars — 780 million miles of driving, and as much as 100 million miles in autopilot mode. This contras...
An alternative to specific regulations for robocars: A liability doubling
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
02 Jun 2016
Can our emotional fear of machines, and the call for premature regulation, be mollified by a temporary increase in liability which takes the place of specific regulations to keep people safe?
So fa...
Robocar news around the globe: Tesla crash, Declaration of Amsterdam, and automaker services
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
01 Jun 2016
We have the first report of a real Tesla autopilot crash. To be fair to Tesla, their owner warnings specify very clearly that the autopilot could crash in just this situation. In the video, there is ...
Self-driving trucks are coming — what will that mean?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 May 2016
Today sees the un-stealthing of a new company called Otto which plans to build self-driving systems for long haul trucks. The company has been formed by a skilled team, including former members of Goo...
The coming nightmare for the car industry
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
11 May 2016
I have often written on the challenge facing existing automakers in the world of robocars. They need to learn to completely switch their way of thinking in a world of mobility on demand, and not all o...
Where’s Susi? Airborne orangutan tracking with python and react.js
Dirk Gorissen
27 Apr 2016
You are faced with a few thousand hectares of rainforest that you know harbours one or more orangutans that you need to track down. Where, how, and why do you start looking?...
