[Blindtlk] On the Road in Mobileye's Self-Driving Car

[Daniel Garcia]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/science/on-the-road-in-mobileyes-self-driv
ing-car.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1&

May 27, 2013
At High Speed, on the Road to a Driverless Future
By  JOHN MARKOFF
JERUSALEM - Last month, on a freeway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, I sat
in the driver's seat of an Audi A7 while software connected to a video
camera on the windshield drove the car at speeds up to 65 miles an hour -
making a singular statement about the rapid progress in the development of
self-driving cars.        
While the widely publicized Google car and other autonomous vehicles are
festooned with cameras, radar and the laser range finders called lidars,
this one is distinctive because of the simplicity and the relatively low
cost of its system - just a few hundred dollars' worth of materials. "The
idea is to get the best out of camera-only autonomous driving," said Gaby
Hayon, senior vice president for research and development at Mobileye Vision
Technologies, the Israeli company that created the system in the Audi.

The Mobileye car does not offer the autonomy achieved by Google's engineers.
The Google car, which has been tested for more than 500,000 miles in
California traffic, will merge onto freeways, drive safely through
intersections, make left and right turns, and pass slower vehicles.        
By contrast, the Mobileye vehicle is capable only of driving in a single
lane at freeway speeds, as well as identifying traffic lights and
automatically slowing, stopping and then returning to highway speeds.

But by blending advanced computer vision techniques with low-cost video
cameras, the company is demonstrating how quickly autonomous driving can be
commercialized. "You cannot have a car with $70,000 of equipment," said
Amnon Shashua, a computer scientist at Hebrew University and a founder of
Mobileye, referring to Google's lidar system, "and imagine that it will go
into mass production."        
 
By Mobileye
Researchers in Israel show the capabilities of a self-driving vehicle.
Elon Musk, the automobile and spaceship entrepreneur, recently made
headlines by saying much the same thing. Mr. Musk said he was interested in
designing self-driving versions of his Tesla automobiles, possibly in
partnership with Google, but in an interview with Bloomberg Mr. Musk said
lidars were too expensive to be used in production cars. Like Google,
Mobileye is not an automobile company, but rather a technology firm that is
intensely focused on developing the next generation of artificial
intelligence software.        
The company was founded in the 1990s, after developers persuaded General
Motors to buy an inexpensive camera that could detect vehicles in adjacent
lanes.        
Since then it has grown into a major supplier of automotive safety
technology, all based on designing advanced algorithms that add
"intelligence" to inexpensive cameras.        
Mobileye has recently begun offering the third generation of its technology,
which companies like Volvo have promoted for its ability to detect
pedestrians and cyclists. Nissan also recently gave a hint of things to come
with a demonstration of a car that could automatically swerve to avoid a
pedestrian who walked out from behind a parked car. The system was based on
Mobileye technology.        
As soon as this summer, the first limited systems offering a feature known
as "traffic jam assist" will begin arriving from more than five major
automobile makers. Those cars will drive safely in stop-and-go traffic, but
will require that drivers keep their hands on the steering wheel.        
But more advanced systems will be introduced as early as 2016, according to
Mobileye, and it was that advanced capability I experienced last month,
during my foray in freeway traffic.        
With two Mobileye engineers, Dr. Hayon and Eyal Bagon, we drove several
miles east of Jerusalem, where Mobileye is located, and then pulled off at a
nondescript turnout where another Mobileye employee waited in a shiny white
Audi A7.        
On the way out of town, the two men were apologetic. This was a work in
progress, they told me.        
I was already feeling a little let down. In California in 2010, I had been
the first reporter to drive in the Google car, a Toyota Prius fitted with
sensors that created a remarkably detailed map of the world around the car.
Moreover, it was connected wirelessly to the Internet, giving it access to a
vast cloud-based set of data that could be matched to what the local sensors
were seeing.        
It was a tour de force. The car merged seamlessly with traffic on Highway
101 and then turned off the freeway to automatically drive through downtown
Mountain View, Calif., where Google has its headquarters. It was taken out
of automatic pilot just twice - while passing a cyclist and then again to
back into a parking space. The Google engineers did not want to chance a
mishap with a reporter on board.        
There was no such caution last month with the Mobileye engineers.        
"Why don't you drive?" Dr. Bagon suggested as he slid into the passenger
seat behind a large display and keyboard. Dr. Hayon jumped into the back
seat, and I had no choice but to get behind the wheel.        
The Mobileye engineers proceeded to give me a rapid-fire lesson on how to
drive their robot car: Turn on the automatic navigation by pressing the
cruise-control button and then pulling a stick on the steering wheel toward
you to activate the "lane-keeping," or steering, feature.        
In a display projected onto the windshield, you can see the speed and an
icon that lets you know the auto driving feature has been switched on.

Following another engineer who had taken off in a car ahead of us, we pulled
onto the highway. After a false start, I engaged the autopilot, and off we
went; I put my hands in my lap and tried to relax as we snaked down a
desolate canyon road on our way to the Dead Sea. When the car ahead of us
slowed for a stoplight, it took all of my willpower to keep my foot off the
brake and trust the car as it rolled smoothly to a stop behind it.        
In the Google car, I had felt detached from the machine intelligence that
guided it. As the car piloted itself through its first curve, there had been
an eerie more-human-than-human sense.        
But in the Mobileye car I was acutely aware of the autopilot's limitations.
The car had a tendency to weave a bit when it started to pull away from an
intersection - behavior that did not inspire confidence. Once, as we were
passing a parked car, the Audi pulled in the direction of the other vehicle.
Not wanting to learn the car's intentions, I lifted my hands out of my lap
and nudged it back to the center of the lane. The Mobileye engineers sat
perfectly calm.        
Later they told me that by the end of the month, the single camera would be
supplemented with an array of five more: a wide-range camera and additional
side-mounted and rear-facing cameras. The goal, they said, was to build a
system with the same capability for autonomous driving as the Google car's.

After 20 minutes of freeway driving, I pulled the Audi off at an
intersection, and then put it back on autopilot and headed toward Jerusalem.
The demonstration was not as eye-popping as my Google ride, but it gave me a
clearer understanding of what the automobile industry has in its sights.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 28, 2013
An earlier version of this article included an outdated figure for the
number of miles driven so far by the experimental Google car. The cars have
now surpassed 500,000 miles in California traffic, not 300,000.