Self Driving Cars  

Autonomous driving features are increasingly becoming available for new cars in the market. Such capabilities have already become the top priority for car buyers according to a recently published study.

The trend to equip cars with advanced driver assistance systems has been clearly noticeable for a while now, with many automakers and tech companies engaged in a race to be the first to launch a driverless car.

This has helped make consumers more familiar with autonomous driving technology, and contributed to making numerous self-driving features commonplace. With so many autonomous driving features being available lately, they have become the top priority for car buyers nowadays, a recently published study shows.

Self-Driving Capabilities and In-Car Connectivity, Most Important

According to the Car Tech Impact Study conducted by used and new car sales website Autotrader, the vast majority of car shoppers want cars that have autonomous features. Autotrader surveyed 1,012 U.S. vehicle shoppers online in September 2015, to see how much consumer car-buying decisions are influenced by automotive technology.

The most important finding from the study is that 77 percent of respondents said that a car's tech features are more important to them than a car's color, which is 8 percentage points higher than in 2014.

Specifically, the technology features that consumers want in their cars have to do with integration of smart devices and autonomous driving. As many as 70 percent of those surveyed responded that they would be willing to buy a car that is equipped with some of the most common advanced safety features.

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"As consumers hear more about autonomous features like automatic braking and collision avoidance technologies, and they begin to understand how they work or actually experience them, they appreciate what they do and they want them," said Michelle Krebs, Autotrader senior analyst.

Furthermore, 83% of respondents said that safety features are higher on their list of priorities than a car's entertainment and information capabilities, and 47% responded that if they owned a smartwatch, they would synchronize them with their in-car infotainment system.

Preferring Apple CarPlay and Android Auto Over Car Makers' Infotainment Systems

When it comes to connectivity, car shoppers don't seem to be too satisfied with the solutions offered by automakers. While infotainment is obviously pretty important to them, many respondents said that they don't like the systems developed by car makers, and would like it better if car companies worked on providing more seamless integration with systems designed by tech companies, such as Google's Android Auto and Apple's CarPlay.

This finding is yet another confirmation to results from several previous studies suggesting that when it comes to infotainment, car shoppers trust tech giants like Google and Apple more than they trust established car manufacturers.

Finally, there are two other interesting findings from this study that confirm just how big of an impact technology has on the car-buying decision making process.

With 46% of respondents saying that they would be willing to spend up to $1,499 to have an interactive dashboard in their cars, and 65% of them answering that they would switch brands if it was necessary to obtain the technology they are interested in, it's clear that technology is one of the key aspects of that process.

By Jordan Perch

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Author Bio - Jordan Perch is an automotive fanatic and “safe driving” specialist. He is a writer for DMV.com, which is a collaborative community designed to help ease the stress and annoyance of “dealing with the DMV.”

Self Driving Cars  

Using light to move mirrors could usher in a new generation of laser technology for a wide range of applications, including remote sensing, self-driving car navigation and 3D biomedical imaging.

Even though there have been many significant advances in autonomous driving technologies lately, there are still many challenges that need to be overcome before driverless cars can become a reality. The fact that the equipment that autonomous cars use – which includes radar sensors and cameras, among other things – is pretty heavy and cumbersome, and very expensive, is one of the few obstacles that engineers working on autonomous driving technologies are trying to overcome in order to make self-driving vehicles a viable alternative to conventional vehicles.

One recent breakthrough by researchers with the University of California promises to resolve this issue, with a report saying that a team of engineers have managed to develop a new laser technology that could help reduce the cost and weight of self-driving cars. The University of California Berkeley has reported that the new 3D-imaging technology that was developed by a team led by Connie Chang-Hasnain, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences has numerous potential applications, which include 3D biomedical imaging and remote sensing.

The researchers say that their system can help reduce the weight and size of LIDARs (sensors that are used to monitor a self-driving car's surroundings and measure the distance from other vehicles and other road users), as it uses a self-sweeping laser that is faster and lighter than the ones employed in current LIDARs, and helps sensors detect objects that are up to 30 feet away. According to the researchers, the laser can be further developed, allowing engineers to create smaller and more energy-efficient LIDARs, which would cost significantly less than the ones that are currently used by automakers and other companies developing driverless cars.

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“While meter-level operating distance is adequate for many traditional metrology instruments, the sweet spot for emerging consumer and robotics applications is around 10 meters” or just over 30 feet, says UC Berkeley’s Behnam Behroozpour.

Thanks to their innovation, the system can change a laser's wavelength faster and identify a light as it is reflected off a car or another moving object, which is the main function of LIDARs. The system is called frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) LIDAR,

"The advance could shrink components that now take up the space of a shoebox down to something compact and lightweight enough for smartphones or small UAVs."

“Our paper describes a fast, self-sweeping laser that can dramatically reduce the power consumption, size, weight and cost of LIDAR and OCT devices on the market today,” said Chang-Hasnain, chair of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group at UC Berkeley. “The advance could shrink components that now take up the space of a shoebox down to something compact and lightweight enough for smartphones or small UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles].”

Considering that the LIDAR sensors that Google uses in its self-driving car program are pretty bulky and very expensive, costing about $80,000, any innovation that could help make these devices more affordable, as well as lighter and more energy-efficient, would surely help accelerate the adoption of autonomous vehicles. With cheaper, lighter and smaller LIDARs, driverless cars would be financially more viable and a lot easier to manufacture, given that they are one of the key pieces of equipment that represent a major portion of the expenses associated with building an autonomous vehicle.

By Jordan Perch

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Author Bio - Jordan Perch is an automotive fanatic and “safe driving” specialist. He is a writer for DMV.com, which is a collaborative community designed to help ease the stress and annoyance of “dealing with the DMV.”

 Self Driving Cars  

Self-driving cars might be closer to hitting modern roads than you’d think. Here are some answers to the questions we all have about this up and coming technology.

Most of us think of self-driving cars more as a technology you might see featured on an episode of The Jetsons than a real-life mode of transportation. However, it turns out that self-driving cars might be closer to hitting modern roads than you’d think.

Google has already developed a functional prototype - a heavily modified Toyota Prius - which can navigate public roads with ease, and government officials in the UK have already approved live road testing of self-driving cars over the next few years. This means that while consumers can’t get their hands on self-driving technology, it will still find its way onto our roadways in the not-too-distant future.

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As the prospect of riding in a self-driving car becomes more and more realistic, drivers are forced to step back and think about how the technology will really affect their lives. There are so many questions to be answered, but these three have to be some of the biggest.

How smart will they be?

You’re driving down the road in your shiny new self-driving car, and a deer jumps out into the road. Unfortunately, you’re driving on a two-lane road, so your car will have to make an important decision. Should it swerve into the opposing lane to miss the deer, or should it continue driving toward a sure animal collision?

Imagine this scenario: you’re driving down the road in your shiny new self-driving car, and a deer jumps out into the road. Unfortunately, you’re driving on a two-lane road, so your car will have to make an important decision. Should it swerve into the opposing lane to miss the deer, or should it continue driving toward a sure animal collision?

It’s these types of questions that get people thinking about the implications of self-driving technology.

Experts say that self-driving cars will have undergone rigorous testing and special programming to take situations like these into account. However, they acknowledge that an autonomous machine will never have the same capacity for crisis response as a human being.

Furthermore, the first round of consumer-ready self-driving cars may still be equipped with manual override controls to handle sticky situations like the one outlined above, which is good because studies indicate that many drivers aren’t ready to hand over control of their vehicles completely.

Will there still be traffic tickets?

In a world where drivers don’t control the acceleration or maneuvering of their vehicles, it stands to reason that there wouldn’t be any more traffic tickets. However, industry analysts say it’s not quite that simple.

Existing prototypes of self-driving cars are actually programmed to drive with the flow of traffic. And obviously, self-driving cars will be cruising on roads filled with a mix of autonomous and manually driven vehicles. So if everybody else is going 15mph over the speed limit, you might just find your self-driving car careening down the highway just to keep up. And there’s nothing stopping law enforcement from writing a ticket in a situation like that.

When will we actually be able to buy them, and how much will they cost?

According to the KMGP and Center for Automotive Research, self-driving cars could be available to the public as soon as 2020. That means that the biggest, most revolutionary piece of automotive technology since the first mass produced automobile itself could be just a handful of years away!

But don’t get too excited. Estimates of cost on the first self-driving cars aren’t quite as exciting.

The technology required to produce current self-driving vehicle prototypes has an estimated cost that tops 300k. Regardless of the inevitable drop in cost as the technology grows and spreads, we can expect it to still be quite high when it hits consumer markets.

Roll on

All in all, self-driving cars are one of the most exciting technologies of our time. While they do come with some uncertainty, and despite the fact that their foundational technology still needs some refining, we may find ourselves surrounded by them in less time than we think!

Image Source -  L&L Automotive

By Carrie Thompson

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 Self-Driving Cars  

Autonomous cars will certainly have a big impact on our lives in the near future.  For now, there are concerns about privacy, and liability issues in case a robotic car gets involved into an accident, and as Jordan Perch explores the very future of car ownership may change.

With driverless cars getting ever closer to rolling into reality, more and more people start to think about the impact they will have on the environment, whether they will improve traffic safety, and what owning such a car will look like, in general. While most people would agree that autonomous cars will have a largely positive impact on their lives, there are still some issues around them, including concerns about privacy, and liability issues in case such a car gets involved into an accident. However, lawmakers have been working on resolving these issues for a while now, and it's safe to say that regulations for driverless cars will be established before they are ready to hit the road.

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But, the question of how car ownership will look like in the future remains open, with some people predicting that driverless cars could end private car ownership as we know it.

While most experts are claiming that self-driving cars will help reduce congestion, there are those who are saying that the opposite scenario could occur. According to Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, one of the most popular car-sharing services, the introduction of autonomous cars could result in more vehicles on the road and even more traffic-congested cities.

The question of how car ownership will look like in the future remains open, with some people predicting that driverless cars could end private car ownership as we know it.

Chase made an address at the New York Internet Week that was held recently, focusing on the future with self-driving cars and whether the changes they will bring about will be mostly positive on negative. She said that she was worried that autonomous car owners will be sending their cars to run errands for them, and they won't even enter the vehicles. She added that people won't hesitate to have their cars do the tasks they don't enjoy doing, such as going to the dry cleaner during rush hour, meaning that the number of cars on the road will increase substantially, resulting in more congested streets and worse air quality.

On the other hand, there is a good chance that autonomous cars will help eliminate the concept of private car ownership, and promote car-sharing and ride-sharing services. Considering that self-driving cars are expected to be quite expensive, only rich people will be able to afford to own one, whereas middle-class consumers will have to share rides or rent cars, which will be a far more cost-effective option. If this scenario happens, car sales will drop drastically, and more people will use alternative modes of transportation. This is where autonomous cars can turn out to be very useful. They could be owned by public transit companies or local authorities, and people could rent a shared autonomous vehicle whenever they need it, have it pick them up at a given location, and drop them off at the desired destination, picking other people up along the road. After the car drops everyone off, it can park itself and wait until it gets rented by another user. This is a far more efficient use of cars, considering that most of them are sitting on parking lots or in garages unused about 90 percent of the time.

By Jordan Perch

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Author Bio - Jordan Perch is an automotive fanatic and “safe driving” specialist. He is a writer for DMV.com, which is a collaborative community designed to help ease the stress and annoyance of “dealing with the DMV”

 Self Driving Cars  

Google's self driving cars have now logged nearly 700,000 autonomous miles, and with every passing mile their research team is growing more optimistic that the goal of a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention is possible.

Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. All of these occurrences and more are faced by human drivers everyday, and now they are the challenges of teams around the world developing self driving cars.

"We’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving."

Google has posted an update on their blog showing some of the progress their team has been making over the last year with its self-driving car initiative. The driverless cars have been tackling the challenge of navigating city streets of Google’s home town, Mountain View, California.

Freeway driving has already been largely tackled by the self driving car team, so now they are ready for the next challenge.

Google's vehicles have now logged nearly 700,000 autonomous miles, and with every passing mile they are growing more optimistic that the goal of a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention is possible.

  "We’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving," claims the post.

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Since our last update, we’ve logged thousands of miles on the streets of our hometown of Mountain View, Calif. A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area. We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.

The video above details how Google's vehicles navigate some urban driving scenarios in and around Mountain View.

According to Google, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. "As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it)," they write.

There are still a multitude of problems to figure out before Google can really start making and selling self driving cars, "But thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously."


SOURCE  Official Google Blog

By 33rd Square

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 Driverless Vehicles

Self driving vehicles will safely move through intersections at full speed, according to researchers from Virginia Tech Transportation Research.  In the proposed system, that is currently being tested, robotically controlled cars will turn over control to an automated intersection controller, with the controller tweaking their routes to prevent crashes.

Self-driving cars are on the near term horizon and if researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Research plan comes to light, the vehicles will move through intersections faster and safer than if humans were in charge and virtually eliminate traffic jams in the process.

In the proposed system, self-driving cars will turn themselves over to an automated intersection controller, which will allow the vehicles to move at the speed limit, with the controller tweaking their trajectory to prevent crashes, explained Ismail Zohdy, a Ph.D. student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech, and Hesham Rakha, director of the Center for Sustainable Mobility at the transportation institute and professor of civil engineering at the university.

Their research on Optimizing Driverless Vehicles at Intersections, presented at the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress in Vienna, won the Best Scientific Paper Award for North America. ITS also stands for intelligent transportation systems.

"The paper develops a step-by-step procedure, or algorithm, for managing driverless vehicles through intersections," said Zohdy. "The proposed system considers the vehicles’ location, speed, and acceleration plus the surrounding environment, such as weather and intersection characteristics."

"The proposed intersection controller, which allows vehicles to keep moving, reduces the delay for each vehicle compared to traditional intersection control," said Rakha. "Keeping vehicles moving is also more fuel efficient and reduces emissions."

With driver behavior considered to be the leading cause of more than 90 percent of accidents, safety is the main motivation for driverless vehicles. "Somewhere in the future, you will not be driving your car anymore; you will be driven by your car," said Zohdy. "A driverless vehicle can much more accurately judge distances and velocities, and react instantly to situations that could cause an accident due to a delayed human reaction."

"We are not talking about the distant future," said Rakha. A May 5, 2011, article in the New York Times reported that after the successful test of the Google driverless vehicle, Nevada passed a law that would have let self-driving cars on the road as soon as March 1, 2012. This provided the motivation for Zohdy's work on developing innovative optimization algorithms for controlling such vehicles, and the Intelligent Transportation Society's interest.

"Intelligent transportation systems are an interaction of many complex entities that communicate with each other, such as vehicles, traffic signals, and advisory signs. Driverless vehicles would be capable of interacting with these other entities," said Zohdy.

"Many such intelligent systems already exist, such as dynamic routing and congestion management, and intelligent traffic control," said Rakha. "Autonomous vehicles are inspired by the research done on robotic control."

In Zohdy and Rakha's research, the intersection controller governs the vehicles within 200 meters (218.7 yards) from the intersection. The vehicles report their physical characteristics, such as power, mass, speed, location, and acceleration. "The aim of giving complete authority to the controller is to overcome any selfish behavior by an autonomous vehicle and benefit all vehicles in the intersection zone," said Zohdy. "The controller determines the optimum speed and acceleration at each time step for every vehicle within the intersection zone by processing the input data through a real-time simulator/tool, as shown using YouTube."

The research was done based on a four-way intersection with one vehicle entering from each direction and moving straight through. It has since been expanded and tested on more congested intersections involving not fully deployed systems and comparing this type of control to traffic signal and roundabout control. “We were testing it if only 10 percent of the vehicles were automated and the other 90 percent were regular vehicles with driver control. We varied the level of automation from 10 to 100 percent at 10 percent increments,” said Rakha. This effort has resulted in two papers that will be presented that the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in January 2013.

Zohdy and Rakha will also be testing their system on a roundabout on the Virginia Tech campus as part of the Connected Vehicle/Infrastructure University Transportation Center.




SOURCE  Viginia Tech

By 33rd Square

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