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Self-driving cars, meet rubber duckies
MIT News
21 Apr 2016
MIT has offered courses on everything from pirate training to “street-fighting math,” but a new robotics class is truly one for the birds....
GM’s purchase of Cruise fuels interest in self-driving car kits
Frank Tobe
19 Apr 2016
Most car companies are remaking themselves into tech startups as they move toward offering fully autonomous self-driving vehicles. Yet thousands of tractors already use self-driving kits as ...
How would a robocar handle an oncoming tsunami?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
19 Apr 2016
Recently, a reddit user posted a short video of a lucky driver in Japan who was able to turn his car around just in time to escape the torrent of the tsunami....
comma.ai’s neural network car and new technology in robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Apr 2016
Perhaps the world’s most exciting new technology today are deep neural networks, in particular convolutional neural networks, such as “Deep Learning.” These networks are conquering some of the...
Autonomous truck platoons travel across Europe
Frank Tobe
14 Apr 2016
A dozen trucks arrived in Rotterdam after traveling across Europe in the European Truck Platooning Challenge. Six different truck makers participated: Scania, Daimler, Volvo, IVECO, MAN and DAF....
Robust and transparent governance is key to building trust in driverless cars
Alan Winfield
12 Apr 2016
Sooner or later there will be fatal accident caused by a driverless car. It's not a question of if, but when. What happens immediately following that accident could have a profound effect on the nasce...
Startup bringing driverless taxi service to Singapore
MIT News
27 Mar 2016
An exciting “driverless race” is underway among tech giants the United States: In recent months, Google, Uber, and Tesla have made headlines for developing self-driving taxis for big cities....
Calculating why we should make a lot more robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
24 Mar 2016
I frequently read that people claim one effect of robocars will be car share (when they work as taxis) and fewer cars being made (because most cars stay idle 95% of the time) — which is good news ...
Robotics has its first unicorn – small SF startup Cruise Automation
Andra Keay
18 Mar 2016
Forget about Google and Boston Dynamics. This week the real news is that GM acquired small San Francisco based startup Cruise Automation for the rumored sum of more than $1B US, according to Fortune....
Replacing public transit at night for Uber and Lyft
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
12 Mar 2016
I have a big article forthcoming on the future of public transit. I believe that with the robocar (and van) it moves from being scheduled, route-based mass transit to on-demand, ad-hoc route medium an...
Why Google’s crash is a good thing
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
04 Mar 2016
Reports released reveal that one of Google’s Gen-2 vehicles (the Lexus) has a fender-bender (with a bus) with some responsibility assigned to the system. This is the first crash of this type — all...
NHTSA redefines “driver” of self-driving car
Frank Tobe
13 Feb 2016
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) took an important step towards interpreting safety standards in ways that could make self-driving cars a reality for the public: it said that...
The inevitability of the global march toward self-driving vehicles
Frank Tobe
22 Jan 2016
Perhaps the biggest upcoming robotics-driven economic and social change will be the arrival of fully autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. Imagine a world full of self driving cars, planes and boats ...
Could robotaxis be the answer to electric car depreciation?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
21 Jan 2016
I’ve been electric car shopping, but one thing has stood out as a big concern. Many electric cars are depreciating fast, and it may get even faster. I think part of this is due to the fact that elec...
US feds propose $4B investment in robocars, seek unified regulatory policy
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 Jan 2016
NHTSA, the federal car safety agency, has been talking about getting into the robocar game for a while, and now declares it wants more involvement with two important details:
Unlike California, th...
Google’s detailed intervention rates reveal the real unsolved problem of robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Jan 2016
Hot on the heels of my CES Report is the release of the latest article from Chris Urmson on The View from the Front Seat of the Google Car. Chris heads engineering on the project (and until recently l...
Two New Year’s resolutions for developers of automated vehicles
Bryant Walker Smith
12 Jan 2016
In the spirit of the New Year, and especially in the wake of California's draft rules for the (theoretical) operation of automated motor vehicles, I offer two resolutions for any serious developer of ...
Robocar news roundup: Lyft and GM, Sidecar, the nature of competition, and CES
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
04 Jan 2016
Lyft announced a $500M investment from GM with $500M more, pushing them to a $5.4B valuation, which huge but also just a tenth of Uber's. This was combined with talk of a push to robocars: GM will p...
The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars
CIS Blog
30 Dec 2015
Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. ...
California’s new DMV regulations may kill the state’s robocar lead
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 Dec 2015
Be careful what you wish for. Google had previously requested that state regulations on robocars be clarified, to help ensure that their cars were legal. When California's DMV finally released its pr...
No, a Google car was not ticketed for going too slow (and other robocar stories)
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
23 Nov 2015
Almost every newspaper in the world reported the story of how a motorcycle cop pulled over one of Google’s 3rd generation test cars, the 2-seaters, and many incorrectly reported that the car was gi...
Why Tesla’s Autopilot and Google’s car are entirely different animals
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
28 Oct 2015
In the buzz over the Tesla autopilot update, a lot of commentary has appeared comparing this Autopilot with Google’s car effort and other efforts and what I would call a “real” robocar — one t...
Stanford’s self-driving Delorean goes drifting for Back to the Future Day
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
21 Oct 2015
Last night, I attended Stanford’s unveiling of their newest research vehicle for self-driving. An old Delorean has been heavily modified in order to perform drifting experiments - where you let the ...
Should cars be fully driverless? No, says MIT engineer and historian David Mindell
MIT News
15 Oct 2015
by Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office
If you follow technology news — or even if you don’t — you have probably heard that numerous companies have been trying to develop driverless cars for a de...
Robocar news roundup: Google’s hire, BMW/Mercedes carsharing, Apple clues, and more
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
14 Oct 2015
View image | gettyimages.com
During a very busy September of travel, I let a number of important stories fall through the cracks. The volume of mainstream press articles on Robocars is immense. Mos...
Volvo says it will accept “full liability” when its cars are operating autonomously
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
08 Oct 2015
In a statement released yesterday, Volvo said it would accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode....
Robocars don’t need fancy dashboards and streets
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
07 Oct 2015
Yesterday I attended the “Silicon Valley reinvents the wheel” conference by the Western Automotive Journalists, which had a variety of talks and demonstrations of new car technology. Now that rob...
What does the VW scandal mean for robocars?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
05 Oct 2015
Most of you will have heard about the revelations that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It’s very bad for VW, but ...
IEEE driverless car roundtable
CIS Blog
30 Sep 2015
[focus07]
Hear about the current state of the driverless vehicle industry from experts including IEEE Member Jeffrey Miller, IEEE Fellow Wei-Bin Zhang, Bernard Soriano, and Bryant Walker Smith. In ...
Tricking LIDAR and robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
14 Sep 2015
Security researcher Jonathan Petit claims to be able to hack the multi-thousand-dollar laser ranging - LIDAR - systems that self-driving cars rely on. How does he do it and is it as dangerous as it so...
Former DARPA Program Manager Gill Pratt to direct Toyota’s new $50M robotics investment
Ioannis K. Erripis
04 Sep 2015
In a surprise move today, Toyota held a press conference (see video below) announcing a substantial investment in robotics and AI research to develop "advanced driving support" technology, with forme...
New book by John Markoff explores common ground between humans and robots
Frank Tobe
24 Aug 2015
NY Times tech writer John Markoff traces the origins of the AI embedded in today’s virtual and physical assistants and suggests a humane way to proceed....
Google Alphabet: Is it good for robocars?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
14 Aug 2015
Everybody has heard about Google’s restructuring. In the new setup, Google X, which includes the self-driving car division, will be a subsidiary of the new Alphabet holding company, and no longer pa...
Will robocars vastly increase battery life?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
21 Jul 2015
We know electric cars are getting better and likely to get popular even when driven by humans. Tesla, at its core, is a battery technology company as much as it’s a car company, and it is sometimes ...
Video: Robocar Q&A
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
20 Jul 2015
At Singularity U, we’re releasing a new video series answering questions about our future technology topics that come from Twitter. My segment is one of the first, and while regular readers of my bl...
Robocar news roundup: Google doesn’t hit Delphi but does go to Austin; Vislab sold for $30M
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
13 Jul 2015
The press were all a-twitter about a report from Reuters that there had been a near miss between Delphi’s test car and one of Google’s, though it was quickly denied that anything happened....
