Robocar roundup: Google deploys nextgen cars on city streets; Mercedes Freightleiner tests in NV

Google has done over 2.7 million km of testing with their existing fleet, they announced. Now, they will be putting their small “buggy” vehicle onto real streets in Mountain View. The cars will stick to slower streets and are NEVs that only go 25mph.

While this vehicle is designed for fully automatic operation, as required during the testing phase it will have a temporary set of controls for the safety driver to use in case of any problem. Google’s buggy, which still has no official name, has been built in a small fleet and has been operating on test tracks up to this point. Now it will need to operate among other road users and pedestrians.

Accidents with — but not caused by — self-driving cars

The press were terribly excited when reports filed with the State of California indicated that there had been four accidents reported — three for Google and one for Delphi. Google reported a total of eleven accidents in six years of testing and over 1.5 million miles.

Headlines spoke loudly about the cars being in accidents, but buried in the copy was the fact that none of the accidents by any company were the fault of the software. Several took place during human driving, and the rest were accidents that were clearly the fault of the other party, such as being rear ended or hit while stopped.

Still, some of press noticed that this accident rate is higher than normal, in fact almost double. Human drivers are in an accident about every 250,000 miles; at that rate Google should have had only six accidents during its 1.5 million miles.

The answer may be that these vehicles are unusual and have “self driving car” written on them. They may be distracting other drivers, making it more likely that those drivers will make a mistake. Anecdotally, people who have encountered a Google car on the road have told me “I thought about going in front of it and braking to see what it would do,”— though they said they didn’t do it in the end. Doing so would be both risky and obnoxious, and fortunately experience shows that it’s very rare for other drivers to actually try to “test” the car. But perhaps people who think about doing so distract themselves and end up in an accident — not good, of course, but it’s a problem that should diminish as the novelty of the cars decreases.

Mercedes and Freightliner test in Nevada

There was also lots of press about a combined project of Mercedes/Daimler and Freightliner to test a self-driving truck in Nevada. There is no reason that we won’t eventually have self-driving trucks, of course, and there are direct economic benefits for trucking fleets to not require drivers.

Self-driving trucks are not new off-road. In fact the first commercial self-driving vehicles were mining trucks at the Rio Tinto mine in Australia. Small startup Peleton is producing a system to let truckers convoy, with the rear driver able to go hands-free. Putting them on regular roads is a big step, but it opens some difficult questions.

First, it is not wise to do this early on. Systems will not be perfect, and there will be accidents. You want your first accidents to be with something like Google’s buggy or a Prius, not with an 18-wheel semi-truck. “Your first is your worst” with software and so your first should be small and light.

Secondly, this truck opens up the jobs question much more than other vehicles, where the main goal is to replace amateur drivers, not professionals. Yes, cab drivers will slowly fade out of existence as the decades pass, but nobody grows up wanting to be a cab driver — it’s a job you fall into for a short time because it’s quick and easy work that doesn’t need much training. While other people build robots to replace workers, the developers of self-driving cars are mostly working on saving lives and increasing convenience.

Many jobs have been changed by automation, of course, and this will keep happening, and it will happen faster. Truck drivers are just one group that will face this, and they are not the first. On the other hand, the reality is that while automation has happened at a grand scale, there are more people working today than ever. People move to other jobs, and they will continue to do so. This may not be much satisfaction for those who will need to go through this task, but the other benefits of robocars are so large that it’s hard to imagine delaying them because of this. Jobs are important, but lives are even more important.

It’s also worth noting that today there is a large shortage of truck drivers, and as such the early robotic trucks will not be taking any jobs.

I’m more interested in tiny delivery “trucks”, which I call “deliverbots.” For long haul, having large shared cargo vehicles makes sense, but for delivery, it can be better to have a small robot do the job and make it direct and personal.

New Sensors

The world of sensors continues to grow. This wideband software-based radar from a student team won a prize. It claims to produce a 3D image. Today’s automotive radars have long range but very low resolution. High resolution radar could replace radar if it gets enough resolution. Radar sees further, and sees through fog, and gives you a speed value, and LIDAR falls short in those areas.

Also noteworthy is this article on getting centimeter GPS accuracy with COTS GPS equipment. They claim to be able to eliminate a lot of multipath through random movements of the antennas. If true, it could be a huge localization breakthrough. GPS just isn’t good enough for robocar positioning. Aside from the fact it goes away in some locations like tunnels, and even though modern techniques can get sub-cm accuracy, if you want to position your robocar with it, and it alone, you need it to essentially never fail. But it does.

That said, most other localization systems, including map and image based localization, benefit from getting good GPS data to keep them reliable. The two systems together work very well, and making either one better helps.

Transportation Secretary Fox advances DoT plan

Secretary Fox has been out writing articles and Speaking in Silicon Valley about their Beyond Traffic effort. They promise big promotion of robocars, which is good. Sadly, they also keep promoting the false idea that vehicle to vehicle communications are valuable and will play a significant role in the development of robocars. In my view, many inside the DoT staked their careers on V2V, and so feel required to promote it even though it has minimal compelling applications and may actually be rejected entirely by the robocar community because of security issues.

This debate is going to continue for a while, it seems.

Maps, maps, maps

Nokia has put its “Here” map division up for sale, and a large part of the attention seems to related to their HD Maps project, aimed at making maps for self-driving. (HERE published a short interview with me on the value of these maps.)

It will be interesting to see how much money that commands. At the same time, TomTom, another mapping company, has announced it will begin making maps for self-driving cars — a decision they made in part because of encouragement from yours truly.

Uber dwarfs taxis

Many who thought Uber’s valuation is crazy came to that conclusion because they looked at the size of the Taxi industry. To the surprise of nobody who has followed Uber, they recently revealed that in San Francisco, their birthplace, they are now three times the size of the old taxi industry, and growing. It was entirely the wrong comparison to make. The same is true of robocars. They won’t just match what Uber does, they will change the world.

There’s more news to come during a brief visit home, but I’m off to play in Peoria, and then Africa next week!

This article originally appeared on robocars.com.

• Issues in regulating robocars, and the case for a light hand
• Robots Podcast: Sensors for autonomous driving
• Automated Driving Fail
• Programming safety into self-driving cars

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Brad Templeton, Robocars.com is an EFF board member, Singularity U faculty, a self-driving car consultant, and entrepreneur.

Brad Templeton, Robocars.com is an EFF board member, Singularity U faculty, a self-driving car consultant, and entrepreneur.