[nfb-talk] Fw: Guided by Computers and Sensors, a Smooth Ride at 60 Miles Per Hour

[Ed Meskys]

This is an interesting complement to our own efforts...Ed Meskys
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louis Gosselin" To: "'Ed Meskys'" <edmeskys at roadrunner.com>; Sent: 
Sunday, October 10, 2010 11:08 AM
Subject: Guided by Computers and Sensors, a Smooth Ride at 60 Miles Per Hour


SMARTER THAN YOU THINK. Guided by Computers and Sensors, a Smooth Ride at 60
Miles
Per Hour.
NY Times Sunday, 2010_10_10
By JOHN MARKOFF. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- As we merged with freeway traffic 
on
Highway
101, one of Silicon Valley's busiest freeways, Christopher Urmson, the man 
in
the
driver's seat, gestured, not touching the steering wheel.
Mr. Urmson is a Google engineer, and last Wednesday, I sat belted in the 
back
seat
as he talked and as the car, a Toyota Prius equipped by Google with radar,
video,
motion sensors and a GPS device, drove itself at 60 miles an hour.
My eyes were glued to the 22-inch three-dimensional color display in front 
of
Dmitri
Dolgov, an artificial intelligence researcher at Google who was riding 
shotgun.
It
showed the world around us in great detail, down to painted lane markers, 
stop
signs,
traffic lights and a sliding green column that indicated our path. A blocky
yellow
object representing a car was coming up behind us in the lane we were 
entering
as
the robotic, female voice of the Prius announced, 'Preparing to change lane.
Don't worry, we have plenty of room,' Dr. Urmson said.
We followed a 12-mile planned route in a vehicle that looks different from 
the
striking
Google Street View cars, which are distinguished by a 
six-and-a-half-foot-tall
camera
mast.
Instead, Google's autonomous Prius has a more modest if no less striking 
sensor
mounted
in the center of the vehicle's roof. Known as Lidar, or Light Detection and
Ranging,
it provides a continuously updated three-dimensional map of the world at
centimeter
accuracy extending for more than 230 feet around the car.
The Lidar is supplemented by four standard automotive radars with less
resolution
and greater range, three in front and one in the rear. Inside the car,
positioned
next to the rear-view mirror, is a high-resolution video camera to detect 
street
lights and moving obstacles like pedestrians and bicyclists. The Prius also 
has
a
GPS receiver and an inertial motion sensor.
The same, or very similar, sensor array was used on many of the cars that
competed
in the 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Urban Challenge, a
competition
for autonomous automobiles held on the grounds of a former Air Force base.
What has changed -- in addition to the use of public roads -- is the 
computing
power
available to the designers and the artificial intelligence software. 
Designers
have
made advances in detecting pedestrians, street lights and lane markers, as 
well
as
in resolving conflicting sensor data and in motion planning to avoid 
obstacles.
A
traffic-cop program monitors all the car's processes.
One main technique used by the Google team is known as SLAM, or simultaneous
localization
and mapping, which builds and updates a map of a vehicle's surroundings 
while
keeping
the vehicle located within the map. To make a SLAM map, the car is first 
driven
manually
along a route while its sensors capture location, feature and obstacle data.
Then
a group of software engineers annotates the maps, making certain that road
signs,
crosswalks, street lights and unusual features are all embedded. The cars 
then
drive
autonomously over the mapped routes, recording changes as they occur and
updating
the map. The researchers said they were surprised to find how frequently the
roads
their robots drove on had changed.
Unsolved problems remain. Sebastian Thrun, a Google engineer and head of the
Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said the design team was stumped by how 
to
train
its system to follow the hand signals that a human traffic cop or crossing 
guard
might make.
Despite its limitations -- and they are significant -- the Google car's
abilities
occasionally gave me goose bumps, particularly compared with previous rides 
in
autonomous
vehicles. In 2005, I was in such a vehicle with Dr. Thrun and two others 
when it
swerved off a gravel road at more than 20 miles per hour. Unlike the newer
Google
cars, the only way to wrest control from that car was to hit a large red 
button
on
the driver's console, and Dr. Thrun was simply unable to push the button 
quickly
enough to keep the car from driving into the brush.
For me, the tour de force of the new car came when the vehicle halted at a 
stop
sign
to make a right turn. It waited patiently for a vehicle in front of it to 
turn,
then
inched forward. A car was approaching from the left, but the Prius pulled 
into
the
far right lane, and I realized that it 'knew' the other car was not in our 
lane
even
though it was passing close to us. There was no need to hit the red button.
PHOTO: A car driven by computer hardware recently attracted the attention of 
a
bicyclist
in Mountain View, Calif. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAMIN RAHIMIAN FOR THE NEW YORK 
TIMES) .
SMARTER THAN YOU THINK. Look Officer, No Hands: Google Car Drives Itself.
By JOHN MARKOFF. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Anyone driving the twists of 
Highway 1
between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota 
Prius
with
a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the 
person
at the wheel was not actually driving.
The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in 
plain
view
on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence 
software
that
can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human 
driver.
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a
technician
in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have
driven
1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only
occasional
human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, 
one
of
the steepest and curviest streets in the nation.The only accident, engineers
said,
was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have 
long
dreamed
of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the 
Internet
has.
Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do 
not
get
distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms 
of
lives
saved and injuries avoided -- more than 37,000 people died in car accidents 
in
the
United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the
capacity
of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. 
Because
the
robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built
lighter,
reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must 
be
far
more reliable than, say, today's personal computers, which crash on occasion 
and
are frequently infected.
The Google research program using artificial intelligence to revolutionize 
the
automobile
is proof that the company's ambitions reach beyond the search engine 
business.
The
program is also a departure from the mainstream of innovation in Silicon 
Valley,
which has veered toward social networks and Hollywood-style digital media.
During a half-hour drive beginning on Google's campus 35 miles south of San
Francisco
last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a 
route
programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance
lane
and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through 
Silicon
Valley.
It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road 
is
included
in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop 
the
car
produced a detailed map of the environment.
The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for 
lights
and
stop signs, as well as making announcements like 'approaching a crosswalk' 
(to
warn
the human at the wheel) or 'turn ahead' in a pleasant female voice. This 
same
pleasant
voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system
detected
anything amiss with the various sensors.
The car can be programmed for different driving personalities -- from 
cautious,
in
which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is 
more
likely to go first.
Christopher Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics scientist, was 
behind
the
wheel but not using it. To gain control of the car he has to do one of three
things:
hit a red button near his right hand, touch the brake or turn the steering
wheel.
He did so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car 
in
front
stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to
have
prevented an accident itself.
When he returned to automated 'cruise' mode, the car gave a little 'whir' 
meant
to
evoke going into warp drive on 'Star Trek,' and Dr. Urmson was able to rest 
his
hands
by his sides or gesticulate when talking to a passenger in the back seat. He
said
the cars did attract attention, but people seem to think they are just the 
next
generation
of the Street View cars that Google uses to take photographs and collect 
data
for
its maps.
The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director 
of
the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the
co-inventor
of the Street View mapping service.
In 2005, he led a team of Stanford students and faculty members in designing 
the
Stanley robot car, winning the second Grand Challenge of the Defense 
Advanced
Research
Projects Agency, a $2 million Pentagon prize for driving autonomously over 
132
miles
in the desert.
Besides the team of 15 engineers working on the current project, Google 
hired
more
than a dozen people, each with a spotless driving record, to sit in the 
driver's
seat, paying $15 an hour or more. Google is using six Priuses and an Audi TT 
in
the
project.
The Google researchers said the company did not yet have a clear plan to 
create
a
business from the experiments. Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter 
of
the
potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the 
nation's
energy
costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google's co-founder, 
according
to
several people familiar with the project.
The self-driving car initiative is an example of Google's willingness to 
gamble
on
technology that may not pay off for years, Dr. Thrun said. Even the most
optimistic
predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away.
One way Google might be able to profit is to provide information and 
navigation
services
for makers of autonomous vehicles. Or, it might sell or give away the 
navigation
technology itself, much as it offers its Android smart phone system to 
cellphone
companies.
But the advent of autonomous vehicles poses thorny legal issues, the Google
researchers
acknowledged. Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all
times,
but what does that mean if the human is not really paying attention as the 
car
crosses
through, say, a school zone, figuring that the robot is driving more safely 
than
he would?
And in the event of an accident, who would be liable -- the person behind 
the
wheel
or the maker of the software?
The technology is ahead of the law in many areas,' said Bernard Lu, senior 
staff
counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. If you look at the
vehicle
code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and 
they
all
presume to have a human being operating the vehicle.
The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California's motor
vehicle
regulations and determined that because a human driver can override any 
error,
the
experimental cars are legal. Mr. Lu agreed.
Scientists and engineers have been designing autonomous vehicles since the
mid-1960s,
but crucial innovation happened in 2004 when the Pentagon's research arm 
began
its
Grand Challenge.
The first contest ended in failure, but in 2005, Dr. Thrun's Stanford team 
built
the car that won a race with a rival vehicle built by a team from Carnegie
Mellon
University. Less than two years later, another event proved that autonomous
vehicles
could drive safely in urban settings.
Advances have been so encouraging that Dr. Thrun sounds like an evangelist 
when
he
speaks of robot cars. There is their potential to reduce fuel consumption by
eliminating
heavy-footed stop-and-go drivers and, given the reduced possibility of
accidents,
to ultimately build more lightweight vehicles.
There is even the farther-off prospect of cars that do not need anyone 
behind
the
wheel. That would allow the cars to be summoned electronically, so that 
people
could
share them. Fewer cars would then be needed, reducing the need for parking
spaces,
which consume valuable land.
And, of course, the cars could save humans from themselves. Can we text 
twice as
much while driving, without the guilt? Dr. Thrun said in a recent talk. Yes, 
we
can,
if only cars will drive themselves.
Smarter Than You Think: Articles in this series are examining the recent
advances
in artificial intelligence and robotics and their potential impact on 
society.
PHOTOS: Dmitri Dolgov, a Google engineer, in a self-driving car parked in
Silicon
Valley after a road test. (A1); A self-driving car developed and outfitted 
by
Google,
with device on roof, cruising along recently on Highway 101 in Mountain 
View,
Calif.;
Computer hardware in the trunk of one of the seven self-driving test 
vehicles.;
Autonomous
Driving: Google's modified Toyota Prius uses an array of sensors to navigate
public
roads without a human driver. Other components, not shown, include a GPS
receiver
and an inertial motion sensor. (Source: Google) (PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAMIN 
RAHIMIAN
FOR
THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A18) .



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.862 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3188 - Release Date: 10/10/10 
02:34:00