[nfb-talk] Fw: Yes, Driverless Cars Know the Way to San Jose.

[Ed Meskys]

Yes, Driverless Cars Know the Way to San Jose.
NY Times Sunday, 2012_10_28
By HENRY FOUNTAIN. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
THE 'look Ma, no hands' moment came at about 60 miles an hour on Highway 
101..
Brian Torcellini, Google's driving program manager, had driven the white 
Lexus
RX
450h out of the parking lot at one of the company's research buildings and 
along
local streets to the freeway, a main artery through Silicon Valley. But 
shortly
after
clearing the on-ramp and accelerating to the pace of traffic, he pushed a 
yellow
button on the modified console between the front seats. A loud electronic 
chime
came
from the car's speakers, followed by a synthesized female voice.
Autodriving,' it announced breathlessly.
Mr. Torcellini took his hands off the steering wheel, lifted his foot from 
the
accelerator,
and the Lexus hybrid drove itself, following the curves of the freeway, 
speeding
up to get out of another car's blind spot, moving over slightly to stay well
clear
of a truck in the next lane, slowing when a car cut in front.
We adjusted our speed to give him a little room,' said Anthony Levandowski, 
one
of
the lead engineers for Google's self-driving-car project, who was monitoring 
the
system on a laptop from the passenger seat. Just like a person would.
Since the project was first widely publicized more than two years ago, 
Google
has
been seen as being at the forefront of efforts to free humans from 
situations
when
driving is drudgery. In all, the company's driverless cars --  
earlier-generation
Toyota Priuses and the newer Lexuses, recognizable by their spinning,
roof-mounted
laser range finders -- have logged about 300,000 miles on all kinds of 
roads.
(Mr.
Torcellini unofficially leads the pack, with roughly 30,000 miles behind the
wheel
-- but not turning it.)
But the company is far from alone in its quest for a car that will drive 
just
like
a person would, or actually better. Most major automobile manufacturers are
working
on self-driving systems in one form or another.
Google says it does not want to make cars, but instead work with suppliers 
and
automakers
to bring its technology to the marketplace. The company sees the project as 
an
outgrowth
of its core work in software and data management, and talks about 
reimagining
people's
relationship with their automobiles.
Self-driving cars, Mr. Levandowski said, will give people 'the ability to 
move
through
space without necessarily wasting your time.
Driving cars, he added, 'is the most important thing that computers are 
going to
do in the next 10 years.
For the automakers, on the other hand, self-driving is more about evolution 
than
revolution -- about building incrementally upon existing features like smart
cruise
control and parking assist to make cars that are safer and easier to drive,
although
the driver is still in control. Full autonomy may be the eventual goal, but 
the
first
aim is to make cars more desirable to customers.
We have this technology,' said Marcial Hernandez, principal engineer at the
Volkswagen
Group's Electronics Research Laboratory, up the road in Belmont, Calif. How 
do
we
turn it into a product that can be advertised to a customer, that will have 
some
benefit to a customer?
With all the research efforts, there is a growing consensus among 
transportation
experts that self-driving cars are coming, sooner than later, and that the
potential
benefits -- in crashes, deaths and injuries avoided, and in roads used more
efficiently,
to name a few -- are enormous. Already, Florida, Nevada and California have 
made
self-driving cars legal for testing purposes, giving each car, in effect, 
its
own
driver's license.
Richard Wallace, director for transportation systems analysis at the Center 
for
Automotive
Research, a nonprofit group that recently released a report on self-driving 
cars
with the consulting firm KPMG, said that probably by the end of the decade, 
'we
would
be able to have a safe, hands-free left-lane commute. In 15 to 20 years, he
said,
'literally from the driveway to destination starts to become possible.
Despite their differing goals, the approaches of Google and the car 
companies
have
much in common. They each rely on sensors to gather data about the car's
environment,
processors to crunch the data, algorithms to interpret the results and make
driving
decisions, and actuators to control the car's movements.
Most of the sensors are already in widespread use. Radar, for example, is 
used
for
features like adaptive cruise control, measuring the distance to the car 
ahead
so
that a safe interval can be maintained. Cameras are used in lane-keeping
systems,
recognizing lane stripes on the road so the car can be steered between them.
Digital encoders, specialized sensors that precisely measure wheel rotation,
have
been employed for years in antilock brakes and stability-control systems.
Accelerometers
have been used to measure changes in speed, particularly for air bags.
GPS devices are useful for self-driving systems, but only in giving a 
general
sense
of the car's location. More important is knowing the car's position in 
respect
to
other vehicles and objects in its immediate environment -- information the 
other
sensors provide.
You use the sensors in the vehicle to very precisely place you locally,' Mr.
Hernandez
said.
In the move toward more autonomous vehicles, one tendency is to integrate 
the
data
from different sensors. Camera recognition systems may be fooled by shadows, 
for
example, thinking they are objects, but radar is not readily tricked.
Some automakers are developing a feature known as traffic jam assist, which
combines
the information from radar and cameras to allow hands-off driving on the 
highway
at speeds of about 30 m.p.h. or less.
We're taking the adaptive cruise control and the lane-keeping and bringing 
them
together,'
Mr. Hernandez said.
Traffic jam assist is a step toward more autonomy, but the car is still far 
from
self-driving; it won't change lanes, for example.
A lot of this is getting people comfortable with the technology, showing 
people
a
benefit,' Mr. Hernandez said. The idea is the driver is always in control --  
the
vehicle is there to help you.
Google's fleet of about a dozen vehicles adds the rooftop laser units to 
gather
a
more useful data stream than the cameras and radar systems alone can do. 
Laser
range
finders, known as lidar units, have been used by some automakers to provide
distance
measurements for their adaptive cruise control systems.
But Google's lidar is far more complex, consisting of 64 infrared lasers 
that
spin
inside a housing atop the car to take measurements in all horizontal 
directions.
(Lidar systems like this are also very expensive -- about $70,000 a unit --  
so
cost
and complexity will have to come down before they can be widely used.)
The units take so many measurements that, when combined with information 
from
the
radar and cameras, a moving map of the car's surroundings can be created in 
the
onboard
computer, a fairly run-of-the-mill desktop. It's a highly detailed map --  
the
lidar
can distinguish, for example, a pickup truck carrying something on a rack 
from a
similarly sized, but boxier, delivery van.
We like lidar because it is actually the most rich sensor you can put on a 
car,'
Mr. Levandowski of Google said. It helps you separate out people from bushes
behind
them, people from each other, people from crosswalks, and it helps you make 
a
3-D
model of the world.
Still, the key to a car being able to truly drive itself lies in the 
software.
The
piece that's missing is not better radars or cameras or lasers or whatever 
we're
using,' he said. It's really the intelligence behind them.
Google's engineers tweak that intelligence based on the driving experience 
of
the
test cars. Safely coping with four-way-stop intersections was really 
difficult,
Mr.
Levandowski said, because a certain amount of assertiveness -- moving into 
the
intersection
slightly to see how other cars react -- is required.
We realized there's subtle communication that goes on,' he said. Once we've 
come
to a stop, we inch forward a bit to signal, hey, we're ready to go. A
self-driving
car that did not assert itself might wind up sitting at the intersection for 
a
long
time as other cars passed on through.
Fundamentally, though, the car has to operate safely, Mr. Levandowski said, 
so
if
another car tries to enter the intersection out of turn, the self-driving 
car
will
yield.
The learning is constant. On the way back from the Highway 101 drive, for
instance,
an extra-long articulated bus turned in front of the Lexus, which was now 
back
in
human-driving mode because the software had been optimized for only highway
driving
that day. But all the sensors were still doing their jobs, so the bus showed 
up
on
Mr. Levandowski's laptop screen as a string of red dots that stretched out 
as
the
bus rounded the corner.
Awesome bus,' Mr. Levandowski said as he typed a note for other engineers to
take
a look.
The system constantly compares the car's map to detailed maps created by 
Google
and
downloaded to the car. Those maps provide a lot of additional information 
that
helps
with navigation, but they also help the car know when conditions have 
changed.
Perhaps construction barrels have just been set up, closing a lane, or a
mattress
or other object has fallen onto the road from a car. By comparing maps, the 
car
knows
its surroundings have changed, and it has to take some action: continue 
driving,
alert the driver that it's time to take back control or, if all else fails, 
pull
over to the side of the road.
The communication is two-way, so in addition to downloading Google's maps, 
the
car
can upload its map to Google. If several self-driving cars upload maps 
showing
the
new construction barrels, for example, Google can update the map it sends to
other
cars, letting those cars anticipate the hazard.
This connectivity is critical to Google's approach, and is one reason its 
system
is more advanced than other efforts. (For current and planned features like
adaptive
cruise control, car companies have not needed to consider communication, but 
as
they
move toward more fully autonomous vehicles they will have to, experts say.)
But even Google acknowledges that its system is not there yet.
We think it is going to be feasible for a computer to drive a car safer than 
a
person
can in the not-too-distant future,' Mr. Levandowski said. By no means are we
there
today. We are in the process of learning.
If and when it is introduced, there will no doubt be limits. What's nice 
about
these
cars is you can actually confine where they operate and how they work 
because
they
know where they are,' Mr. Levandowski said.
So the system may work at first only on some highways, or in other specific
situations.
It's not going to be George Jetson from day one,' he said.. PHOTO: ROBOTIC:
Aside
from the lidar rangefinder unit on its roof, Google's fleet of self-driving
vehicles,
including this Lexus hybrid, look reasonably conventional. (PHOTOGRAPH BY
GOOGLE)(AU4)
GRAPHICS: How an Autonomous Car Gets Around: Self-driving cars that are 
under
development
will rely on a number of sensors and other digital devices, many of which 
are
already
being used for safety and convenience features. (Sources: Velodyne Lidar;
Volkswagen
of America; Google).