Cars That Think
Engineering student Manuel Dangel of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and teammates were walking the racecourse at Formula Student Driverless in Hockenheimring, Germany, earlier this month when they realized that the computerized wheelbarrow they were using to map the course had gone haywire. [ See ” Students Race Driverless Cars in Germany in Formula Student Competition ” sixteen August 2017.]
As part of the track-drive event, one of several events that make up the entire competition, the rules permit teams half an hour to walk the racecourse and make measurements they might need to program their driverless cars. Because the track-drive event consists of ten solo laps on the same, unchanging course among traffic cones, «the basic strategy is to run within the map,» Dangel says. If you cannot make a map before the event, tho’, you have to switch to a more elaborate strategy.
Active Levitation Championed by rLoop in this Weekend’s Hyperloop Competition
Most teams at Sunday`s Hyperloop competition will use passive magnetic fields to levitate their pods inwards the mile-long test track outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The forward movement of the pod induces the necessary electromagnetic field.
But rLoop, a virtual network of engineers from around the world, is following an active strategy: Its pods will levitate under their own power. Project manager Brent Lessard admits that it`s an energy-hungry solution, but he contends that it alone can lead to commercialization of a futuristic–some would say far out–concept for mass transportation. The idea is to send passenger-carrying pods hurtling at near-sonic speeds through a tube held under a partial vacuum.
«We are not in this necessarily to win the competition but to develop Hyperloop technology,» he says. «You will see pods there that are just built for speed–railguns, essentially. We concentrate on a scalable pod, and one that would be capable of carrying a passenger or cargo.»
By making the pod self-sufficient, the design permits the tube to do nothing much beyond hold a partial vacuum, one harshly the same as an airliner practices at high altitudes. Even that requirement slows the competition, however, because every time a pod has to be eliminated and another put in its place the tube must be repressurized, then depressurized.
The costs of having an active, energy-gobbling pod should be offset by the cost savings of infrastructure that`s relatively effortless to build and maintain. And those costs may matter a lot if the plan involves tunneling deep underground, as SpaceX founder and Hyperloop impresario Elon Musk plans to do.
In the previous round of Hyperloop competition, in January, rLoop didn`t even get a chance to make a trial run because there wasn`t enough time and space to accommodate all the entries, Lessard says. The winner was a student-led team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still, rLoop did win a «pod innovation» award–a peak of the hat to rLoop`s concentrate on practicality. If indeed it`s contesting three days from now (27 August) against purpose-designed missiles, it may have to content itself with another such honorable mention.
The pod measures 1.Five meters high (Five feet), one m broad, and four m long; it weighs four hundred forty kilograms (970 pounds). In Sunday`s race, the motive power will be provided by an outward source, but the hovering will be supported by two battery packs. They consist of eighteen modules with six cells each, for a total of four kilowatt-hours, Lessard says.
Those batteries power eight hover engines, each an array of magnets on a motor, the movement of which creates eddy currents which, in turn, produce an electromagnetic field. The engines are on gimbals, to control the pod`s flight–something passive levitation schemes can`t do.
And the pod stays up no matter what happens in the tube. In fact, rLoop`s pod can even levitate its way out of a tube, provided there`s a copper or aluminum sheet under it. And if there isn`t, it can rely on its four wheels, each of which comes with its own electrical motor.
All those moving electrons give off waste fever, of course. To cool the motor, the rLoop design uses liquid carbon dioxide; to cool the batteries, it uses a waxy material that liquefies during a run. Then, in the station, it can give up that warmth by again assuming a solid form.
Because rLoop`s more than one thousand participating engineers hail from 50-plus countries, most of them had never met before the very first part of the competition. «For the 2nd part we did meet to build a prototype,» Lessard says. «We raised more than US $60,000 and partnered with TE Connectivity, which provided a lot of engineering help and also a place to work, in Menlo Park, Calif. We worked the same way we did in the very first part, with online people providing advice to people in California. Some of them also came on vacation or on theirs weekend off.»
Students Race Driverless Cars in Germany in Formula Student Competition
More than a dozen teams brought driverless cars to the Formula Student competition last week in Hockenheimring, Germany. It was the very first event of its type, but many participants were diligent veterans of Formula Student Electrified races and had tested their cars at different types of sites leading up to the main event. «We knew from the electrified season that testing is truly crucial,» says Manuel Dangel, vice-president of the Formula Student Driverless team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Then the rain began falling.
«We thought [our car] would basically fail,» Dangel says. While it had rained on one of their test days, their car`s main way of determining its own ground speed is an optical sensor optimized for dry ground. The team had not managed to finish a utter ten-lap track drive in the rain.
Travis Kalanick’s and Anthony Levandowski’s Texts Tell the Tale of What Uber Knew About Waymo Tech
The epic court case inbetween Waymo and Uber over self-driving car secrets took a tabloid turn last week, as Waymo`s lawyers filed a document containing approximately four hundred text messages inbetween Uber founder Travis Kalanick, and Anthony Levandowski, the engineer accused of taking thousands of files from Waymo to help build Uber`s lidar sensors.
Waymo expected the SMS messages, sent inbetween February and December 2016, to expose what Uber knew, and when the company knew it. Some emails do touch on technical matters–for example, one from Levandowski on five May telling that he was «driving to SF to meet with [Uber`s] laser man and guide the team.»
However, Waymo`s lawyers say that there are «significant and inexplicable gaps» in the text messages, including none at all before February 13, even however the two had certainly met before. Despite this, the texts provide a rich insight into the fellows`s relationship, and into Uber`s plans for (and worries about) its self-driving car technology.
Just two weeks after Levandowski abandon Google, Kalanick was already visiting the engineer`s fresh self-driving truck start-up, Otto. Kalanick was planning to buy Otto almost instantaneously but that rapid tempo came with issues:
Two/13/2016 Kalanick: Good hangin
Two/13/2016 Levandowski: It was awesome. Lots more to come. We ended up wrapping truck testing at Two.30
Two/13/2016 Levandowski: We had a close call but no contact with anyone or anything
This shows up to be a reference to a failure of the self-driving technology that almost resulted in an accident. Presumably, the testing was happening at a test track, as the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) still does not permit the testing of autonomous commercial vehicles.
Four/6/2016 Levandowski: Basically I`d like the freedom to stir as needed on the acquisition (and take advice/guidance) but if I can close them within the range we agreed you guys are glad.
Four/6/2016 Kalanick: I am super down to make sure this [is] quick lightweight and straight forward for you guys
At this point, Otto was being run from Levandowski`s home in Palo Alto. In early April, the DMV launched an investigation that had Levandowski and Kalanick worried.
Four/22/2016 Kalanick: How did they find out?
Four/22/2016 Levandowski: Attempting to dig in, likely city of Palo Alto.
Four/22/2016 Levandowski: Just packaged with the DMV, it was the city of Palo Alto freaking out about AV trucks testing and were asked to investigate. The guys were glad with our answers and were [sic] in the clear.
Levandowski and Kalanick`s Relationship
The two fellows quickly formed a strong bond, but there are challenges–and advantages–when your fresh best friend is the CEO of the world`s largest start-up.
Trio/29/2016 Levandowski: I am at the secret side door, no rush
7/23/2016 Kalanick: You thirsty? .. Can get some Uber Munches steak and eggs.
At these meetings, often late at night, Levandowski would explain the mysteries of self-driving technology to the Uber founder.
Four/8/2016 Kalanick: Where you train me in depth about an autonomy topic
Four/8/2016 Levandowski: Yes, we should of done it. We did a bit on lasers before but need to go deep on all the topics.
In come back, Kalanick dispensed management advice, such as this just before the Otto acquisition was announced:
8/12/2016 Kalanick: Three principles
8/12/2016 Kalanick: 1) don`t tell anyone about the deal before it happens, ESPECIALLY someone you’re about to fire Two) firing rapid is a cultural imperative you don’t want to break except in the most extreme situations Three) get creative
Both studs collective the same ambition:
9/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: We`re going to take over the world
9/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: One robot at a time
Ten/7/2016 Kalanick: Down to dangle this eve and mastermind some shit
Uber Indeed Desired to Playmate With Google
Uber`s rivalry with Alphabet`s self-driving subsidiary Waymo is a latest thing. An earlier court filing contained an email from two thousand fifteen that demonstrated Kalanick and Google founder Larry Page were exploring a partnership on self-driving technology. The fresh text messages suggest that this was still a hope over a year later.
6/13/2016 Kalanick: Just got word from Drummond that g-CO is out
6/13/2016 Levandowski: Wow, at least now we know it’s a zero sum game
David Drummond is Alphabet`s chief legal officer and was a board member of Uber until August 2016. He was the main channel of communication inbetween the companies. «G-co» could refer to cooperation or forming a company with Google, the lack of which cemented the conflict inbetween the two, and ultimately shoved Drummond off the board.
Uber Spotted Tesla as a Hefty Competitor
While Uber followed Google`s cars closely, it was Tesla and Elon Musk that the duo discussed most frequently.
9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lounging about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch all the crashes that are going on.
9/22/2016: We`ve got to embark calling Elon on his shit. I’m not on social media but let’s begin “faketesla” and commence give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like [telling his cars don`t need lidar]
In late October, the two exchanged a flurry of tests about Musk`s announcement that all Teslas would come with all the hardware necessary for total self-driving, sometimes called Level Five.
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: Elon is going to make going to [self driving] not as big of a scary thing for the public. which should be good
Ten/20/2016 Kalanick: Got to get software runnin
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: Amen
Ten/20/2016 Kalanick: What do you think chances are he has Level five in 20% of a given city?
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: For effortless city
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: He’s trippin’ but might/will blame regulatory as to why it’s not available
Did Uber`s Cars Have Real Problems in San Francisco?
In December 2016, Uber launched a self-driving taxi service in San Francisco, without obtaining permission from the DMV. The program lasted only a week, and was dogged by reports of Uber`s sixteen cars running crimson lights. A single text from Levandowski to Kalanick, two days before Uber`s cars had their registrations revoked by the DMV, refers to the issue:
12/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: Quick update on that special intersection in SF, we taped six crimson car violations within two hours
A source close to Uber`s operations says its engineers observed the intersection where Uber`s cars were said to have run the crimson light, and that this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated vehicles also cracking the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its software was to blame.
This post was corrected on fifteen August two thousand seventeen to fix the context of a 12/Nineteen/2016 message and on sixteen August two thousand seventeen to correct the October text message dates.
Sapcorda Plans Centimeter-Scale GPS for Europe
Germany`s Bosch and Geo++, U-blox of Switzerland, and Japan`s Mitsubishi Electrified announced the establishment of Sapcorda Services last Tuesday, a joint venture to provide global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning services of centimeter-level accuracy via satellite transmission, mobile cellular technology, and the Internet.
E-ZPass Could Kickstart Clever Cities
Everyone likes the idea of a wise city. Traffic lights would automatically adjust to optimize traffic flow, you could find parking spaces without circling for hours, and enforcing speed thresholds wouldn`t require a cop on every corner.
The problem is that technologies presently underpinning these systems are often expensive, unreliable, or both. Cameras need pricey computer vision systems to know what they are looking at, and require cleaning, while sensors embedded in the road are too expensive to monitor all but the priciest parking catches sight of. And radars are good at measuring speeds, but poor at specifying individual vehicles.
Now researchers at MIT have designed a clever city system that leverages the windshield tags used to sleek drivers` passage onto toll roads and bridges. E-ZPass tags in the eastern United States–and similar systems nationwide and around the world–are radio-frequency transponders that transmit a unique signal when queried at a certain frequency. That response is typically picked up by a reader mounted on a gantry over the highway, and the driver`s credit card is automatically charged.
However, Dina Katabi and Omid Abari at MIT realized that anyone could prod a transponder to emit its signal, simply by asking nicely. They have developed a petite solar-powered unit called Caroake that can measure the position and speed of up to twenty nearby vehicles that are tooled with E-ZPass transponders. Each Caroake unit presently costs around $100, albeit that figure would drop significantly if the units where produced in volume, say the researchers.
By putting Caroakes on every urban streetlight, the researchers envisage tracking the occupancy of every parking space, counting how many cars are waiting at every traffic light, and perhaps even catching every speeding vehicle. They are about to deploy six readers on public streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts to learn local traffic and parking patterns.
«There is big interest both from the city and from E-ZPass, who see this as a mechanism both to expand the functionality of a device that already exists in the vast majority of cars, and to make the city smarter,» says Katabi.
But the pilot involves much more than simply putting normal E-ZPass readers on poles. The highway readers use very directional antennas to ensure they are querying a single car at a time as it passes underneath them. That technology is both expensive and of limited use in a city, where you want a more holistic view of what is happening along each street.
Instead, the Caroake device activates all E-ZPass tags within a 30-meter range. «In a city, twenty or thirty cars might react at the same time, the signals collide and you get a real mess,» says Katabi. Fortunately, albeit all E-ZPass tags are meant to broadcast at nine hundred fifteen megahertz, in practice individual units tend to stray a little to either side of that frequency. The MIT system uses this so-called carrier frequency offset to separate the signals from one another.
Localizing each tag is another challenge. A pair of antennas in the system calculate the signal`s angle of arrival. For stationary cars, that is enough information to locate them in a parking spot. To track moving cars, two or more neighboring readers can work together to triangulate its position. Caroake units form an ad hoc mesh network with each other, and use a Wi-Fi or cellular LTE gateway to shove data up to brainy city servers.
In tests on MIT`s campus, the Caroake network could determine speed to within eight percent (about 1.6 to Four.8 kilometers per hour) and location to within four degrees, which was accurate enough to place cars in individual parking catches sight of.
Another worry for the researchers was that permanently querying the E-ZPass tags might run down their sealed, non-rechargeable lithium batteries. In normal use, where they might be queried just a few times a day, E-ZPass tags can last a decade. In a clever city, the same tag might be activated a hundred times daily, or more. «We ran experiments and found out that even if you query the transponders every 2nd, their batteries will still run for around ten years,» says Abari.
But the thickest concern for many drivers is likely to be the privacy and security issues that come from being tracked across a city. In 2013, the Fresh York Civil Liberties Union found that city`s Department of Transportation had calmly deployed dozens of standard E-ZPass readers to measure traffic volumes and congestion. The Union called the department`s privacy policies at the time «vague and barebones.»
In their pilot tests, the MIT researchers will measure only the carrier frequency offsets of the transponders and not decode the identifying data bits. «We do not believe that [these] values can be mapped to the owners or used to infer any private information about them,» they wrote.
Of course, if E-ZPass tags were to be used for cash-free parking, they would have to link individual cars to their owners. Dina Katabi thinks that far from infringing people`s privacy, Caroake devices could enable fresh, convenient business models: «It could be used to pay for other services. For example, I could drive to a restaurant and be charged instantaneously, or get access to certain roads at certain times, like congestion charging.»
For those services to be available to everyone–and for the brainy parking and traffic systems to be most effective–every car will need an active transponder. Adoption rates are creeping up as states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania sunset cash toll booths in favour of E-ZPass, but they are still at only eighty to ninety percent.
Perhaps a thicker problem is that anyone worried about Caroake`s Big Brother implications (or who just likes to speed) could temporarily pop their tag in the metallic «read prevention» bag that E-ZPass provides with every unit. After all, clever cities will be home to slew of wise people.
Car Battery Breakthrough Claimed in Japan
Mitsubishi and GS Yuasa say they`ve developed a lithium-ion battery that will give electrical cars twice the range that today’s designs do, for the same cost. The report, in yesterday’s Nikkei Business Daily, adds that the battery will go into mass production in 2020.
Such a battery would at the very least assuage range anxiety among potential car buyers. It could even permit manufacturers to shrink the battery, and thus cut the car`s weight, energy usage, purchase price, and operating cost.
It`s the latest in a string of announcements that imply progress at least as swift as the e-car`s fondest proponents have claimed. Last week, a consortium of German companies exposed plans to build a lithium-ion battery gigafactory to rival Telsa’s, with production slated to begin in 2019. And in June, Toyota–a company that had long talked up fuel cells as the natural successor to batteries–evidently switched direction by touting a fresh lithium-ion battery design using a solid electrolyte. Because this solid-state design would be less sensitive to fever, engineers should be able to pack cells more closely, cutting weight. The design might also permit for swifter charging. Also in June, Volvo said its next-gen models would all employ electrified drive, either alone or hybridized with a gasoline engine.
But as Matthew Eisler pointed out in this space last month, the projection is based on the cost per cell, leaving out the very pertinent metric of battery pack lifetime. That may not be much of a problem for your cell phone`s battery, given the brief lifetime of the phone. But nobody knows yet whether the fresh automotive lithium-ion batteries will need to be substituted before the car wears out.
Then again, it may not matter all that much. Range anxiety may turn out to be more a theoretical than a practical problem, particularly now that electrical cars are packing serious kilowatt-hourage.
A duo of years ago, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that even when a car`s batteries have lost thirty percent of their storage capacity, most people could make the trips they normally make. And that explore was based on the two thousand fifteen Nissan Leaf, which then had a range of just one hundred thirty five kilometers (83 miles). The fresh Chevrolet Bolt can go almost three times as far on a single charge.
Slight Street Sign Modifications Can Totally Idiot Machine Learning Algorithms
It’s very difficult, if not unlikely, for us humans to understand how robots see the world. Their cameras work like our eyes do, but the space inbetween the pic that a camera captures and actionable information about that photo is packed with a black box of machine learning algorithms that are attempting to translate patterns of features into something that they’re familiar with. Training these algorithms usually involves showcasing them a set of different pictures of something (like a stop sign), and then eyeing if they can extract enough common features from those pictures to reliably identify stop signs that aren`t in their training set.
This works pretty well, but the common features that machine learning algorithms come up with generally are not «crimson octagons with the letters S-T-O-P on them.» Rather, they’re looking features that all stop signs share, but would not be in the least bit comprehensible to a human looking at them. If this seems hard to visualize, that’s because it reflects a fundamental disconnect inbetween the way our brains and artificial neural networks interpret the world.
The upshot here is that slight alterations to an pic that are invisible to humans can result in frantically different (and sometimes bizarre) interpretations from a machine learning algorithm. These “adversarial pics” have generally required relatively sophisticated analysis and photo manipulation, but a group of researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and the University of California Berkeley have just published a paper displaying that it’s also possible to trick visual classification algorithms by making slight alterations in the physical world. A little bit of splash paint or some stickers on a stop sign were able to loser a deep neural network-based classifier into thinking it was looking at a speed limit sign one hundred percent of the time.
Tesla Model three to Driver: Look Me in the Eye
Driver-facing cameras aren`t a fresh idea: Cadillac`s CTS Super Cruise uses an infrared camera to monitor your eyes for signs of inattention. So does Audi`s fresh A8, billed as the world`s very first car capable of Level three autonomy.
So you`d expect Tesla to put one in its fresh Model Three, given that it`s supposed to have all the hardware it`ll need for both Level three and Level four autonomy. (Level three requires the driver to be ready to take control, but Level four does not.)
The funny thing, however, is that the Model Trio`s driver-oriented camera isn`t turned on. In fact, its very presence wasn`t mentioned by the company or noticed by the auto writers who very first drove the car. So a peak of the hat goes to Fred Lambert, who confirmed the camera`s existence yesterday, in Electrotek.
According to Elon Musk, all that`s needed for full-bore self-driving power is an over-the-air software download. That, however, won`t come until regulators permit it. So don`t hold your breath. Same goes for actual, on-the-road autonomy for the Audi A8.
Another funny thing is the deliberate inclusion of what you might call sleeper hardware. You`re selling customers something that is of no use now, but will be–you say–later on. Sleeperware is something you don`t often seen in techland because of the rapid product turnover, but even cars practically never have it.
My very first encounter with sleeperware dates back to 1993, when my office upgraded to Macintosh computers that each had a little indentation right above the screen.
«What in the world is that,» I asked a colleague. «It`s a built-in microphone–they think computers will be used as communications devices,» he responded. Hah, I thought.
But it happened, and prompt–within the working life of those 1993-era desktop machines. So maybe the Model three you`re driving will one day drive you.
Carmakers Take to the (Self-Driving) Test Track
Researchers from academia and industry took rails in experimental cars at a public test-track event in Teesdorf, Austria, last week, but the main draw may have been the other attendees.
The event gave smaller companies a chance to attempt out driverless technology on a collective large-scale test track. Formal vehicle testing on closed tracks can cost up to £1000 (US $1320) a day. «We thought we could do something that was a bit different: combine the chance for petite companies and university teams,» says event organizer Alex Lawrence-Berkeley, of Sense Media Group in London, England.
Cars That Think – IEEE Spectrum
Cars That Think
Engineering student Manuel Dangel of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and teammates were walking the racecourse at Formula Student Driverless in Hockenheimring, Germany, earlier this month when they realized that the computerized wheelbarrow they were using to map the course had gone haywire. [ See ” Students Race Driverless Cars in Germany in Formula Student Competition ” sixteen August 2017.]
As part of the track-drive event, one of several events that make up the entire competition, the rules permit teams half an hour to walk the racecourse and make measurements they might need to program their driverless cars. Because the track-drive event consists of ten solo laps on the same, unchanging course among traffic cones, «the basic strategy is to run within the map,» Dangel says. If you cannot make a map before the event, however, you have to switch to a more complicated strategy.
Active Levitation Championed by rLoop in this Weekend’s Hyperloop Competition
Most teams at Sunday`s Hyperloop competition will use passive magnetic fields to levitate their pods inwards the mile-long test track outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The forward movement of the pod induces the necessary electromagnetic field.
But rLoop, a virtual network of engineers from around the world, is following an active strategy: Its pods will levitate under their own power. Project manager Brent Lessard admits that it`s an energy-hungry solution, but he contends that it alone can lead to commercialization of a futuristic–some would say far out–concept for mass transportation. The idea is to send passenger-carrying pods hurtling at near-sonic speeds through a tube held under a partial vacuum.
«We are not in this necessarily to win the competition but to develop Hyperloop technology,» he says. «You will see pods there that are just built for speed–railguns, essentially. We concentrate on a scalable pod, and one that would be capable of carrying a passenger or cargo.»
By making the pod self-sufficient, the design permits the tube to do nothing much beyond hold a partial vacuum, one toughly the same as an airliner practices at high altitudes. Even that requirement slows the competition, tho’, because every time a pod has to be eliminated and another put in its place the tube must be repressurized, then depressurized.
The costs of having an active, energy-gobbling pod should be offset by the cost savings of infrastructure that`s relatively effortless to build and maintain. And those costs may matter a lot if the plan involves tunneling deep underground, as SpaceX founder and Hyperloop impresario Elon Musk plans to do.
In the previous round of Hyperloop competition, in January, rLoop didn`t even get a chance to make a trial run because there wasn`t enough time and space to accommodate all the entries, Lessard says. The winner was a student-led team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still, rLoop did win a «pod innovation» award–a peak of the hat to rLoop`s concentrate on practicality. If indeed it`s challenging three days from now (27 August) against purpose-designed missiles, it may have to content itself with another such honorable mention.
The pod measures 1.Five meters high (Five feet), one m broad, and four m long; it weighs four hundred forty kilograms (970 pounds). In Sunday`s race, the motive power will be provided by an outer source, but the hovering will be supported by two battery packs. They consist of eighteen modules with six cells each, for a total of four kilowatt-hours, Lessard says.
Those batteries power eight hover engines, each an array of magnets on a motor, the movement of which creates eddy currents which, in turn, produce an electromagnetic field. The engines are on gimbals, to control the pod`s flight–something passive levitation schemes can`t do.
And the pod stays up no matter what happens in the tube. In fact, rLoop`s pod can even levitate its way out of a tube, provided there`s a copper or aluminum sheet under it. And if there isn`t, it can rely on its four wheels, each of which comes with its own electrical motor.
All those moving electrons give off waste fever, of course. To cool the motor, the rLoop design uses liquid carbon dioxide; to cool the batteries, it uses a waxy material that liquefies during a run. Then, in the station, it can give up that warmth by again assuming a solid form.
Because rLoop`s more than one thousand participating engineers hail from 50-plus countries, most of them had never met before the very first part of the competition. «For the 2nd part we did meet to build a prototype,» Lessard says. «We raised more than US $60,000 and partnered with TE Connectivity, which provided a lot of engineering help and also a place to work, in Menlo Park, Calif. We worked the same way we did in the very first part, with online people providing advice to people in California. Some of them also came on vacation or on theirs weekend off.»
Students Race Driverless Cars in Germany in Formula Student Competition
More than a dozen teams brought driverless cars to the Formula Student competition last week in Hockenheimring, Germany. It was the very first event of its type, but many participants were diligent veterans of Formula Student Electrical races and had tested their cars at different types of sites leading up to the main event. «We knew from the electrical season that testing is truly crucial,» says Manuel Dangel, vice-president of the Formula Student Driverless team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Then the rain began falling.
«We thought [our car] would basically fail,» Dangel says. While it had rained on one of their test days, their car`s main way of determining its own ground speed is an optical sensor optimized for dry ground. The team had not managed to accomplish a utter ten-lap track drive in the rain.
Travis Kalanick’s and Anthony Levandowski’s Texts Tell the Tale of What Uber Knew About Waymo Tech
The epic court case inbetween Waymo and Uber over self-driving car secrets took a tabloid turn last week, as Waymo`s lawyers filed a document containing approximately four hundred text messages inbetween Uber founder Travis Kalanick, and Anthony Levandowski, the engineer accused of taking thousands of files from Waymo to help build Uber`s lidar sensors.
Waymo expected the SMS messages, sent inbetween February and December 2016, to expose what Uber knew, and when the company knew it. Some emails do touch on technical matters–for example, one from Levandowski on five May telling that he was «driving to SF to meet with [Uber`s] laser stud and guide the team.»
However, Waymo`s lawyers say that there are «significant and inexplicable gaps» in the text messages, including none at all before February 13, even however the two had certainly met before. Despite this, the texts provide a rich insight into the fellows`s relationship, and into Uber`s plans for (and worries about) its self-driving car technology.
Just two weeks after Levandowski abandon Google, Kalanick was already visiting the engineer`s fresh self-driving truck start-up, Otto. Kalanick was planning to buy Otto almost instantaneously but that rapid tempo came with issues:
Two/13/2016 Kalanick: Good hangin
Two/13/2016 Levandowski: It was awesome. Lots more to come. We ended up wrapping truck testing at Two.30
Two/13/2016 Levandowski: We had a close call but no contact with anyone or anything
This shows up to be a reference to a failure of the self-driving technology that almost resulted in an accident. Presumably, the testing was happening at a test track, as the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) still does not permit the testing of autonomous commercial vehicles.
Four/6/2016 Levandowski: Basically I`d like the freedom to budge as needed on the acquisition (and take advice/guidance) but if I can close them within the range we agreed you guys are glad.
Four/6/2016 Kalanick: I am super down to make sure this [is] quick lightweight and straight forward for you guys
At this point, Otto was being run from Levandowski`s home in Palo Alto. In early April, the DMV launched an investigation that had Levandowski and Kalanick worried.
Four/22/2016 Kalanick: How did they find out?
Four/22/2016 Levandowski: Attempting to dig in, likely city of Palo Alto.
Four/22/2016 Levandowski: Just packaged with the DMV, it was the city of Palo Alto freaking out about AV trucks testing and were asked to investigate. The guys were blessed with our answers and were [sic] in the clear.
Levandowski and Kalanick`s Relationship
The two guys quickly formed a strong bond, but there are challenges–and advantages–when your fresh best friend is the CEO of the world`s largest start-up.
Three/29/2016 Levandowski: I am at the secret side door, no rush
7/23/2016 Kalanick: You thirsty? .. Can get some Uber Slurps steak and eggs.
At these meetings, often late at night, Levandowski would explain the mysteries of self-driving technology to the Uber founder.
Four/8/2016 Kalanick: Where you instruct me in depth about an autonomy topic
Four/8/2016 Levandowski: Yes, we should of done it. We did a bit on lasers before but need to go deep on all the topics.
In come back, Kalanick dispensed management advice, such as this just before the Otto acquisition was announced:
8/12/2016 Kalanick: Three principles
8/12/2016 Kalanick: 1) don`t tell anyone about the deal before it happens, ESPECIALLY someone you’re about to fire Two) firing quick is a cultural imperative you don’t want to break except in the most extreme situations Trio) get creative
Both fellows collective the same ambition:
9/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: We`re going to take over the world
9/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: One robot at a time
Ten/7/2016 Kalanick: Down to string up this eve and mastermind some shit
Uber Truly Dreamed to Fucking partner With Google
Uber`s rivalry with Alphabet`s self-driving subsidiary Waymo is a latest thing. An earlier court filing contained an email from two thousand fifteen that demonstrated Kalanick and Google founder Larry Page were exploring a partnership on self-driving technology. The fresh text messages suggest that this was still a hope over a year later.
6/13/2016 Kalanick: Just got word from Drummond that g-CO is out
6/13/2016 Levandowski: Wow, at least now we know it’s a zero sum game
David Drummond is Alphabet`s chief legal officer and was a board member of Uber until August 2016. He was the main channel of communication inbetween the companies. «G-co» could refer to cooperation or forming a company with Google, the lack of which cemented the conflict inbetween the two, and ultimately shoved Drummond off the board.
Uber Spotted Tesla as a Gigantic Competitor
While Uber followed Google`s cars closely, it was Tesla and Elon Musk that the duo discussed most frequently.
9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lounging about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch all the crashes that are going on.
9/22/2016: We`ve got to commence calling Elon on his shit. I’m not on social media but let’s embark “faketesla” and commence give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like [telling his cars don`t need lidar]
In late October, the two exchanged a flurry of tests about Musk`s announcement that all Teslas would come with all the hardware necessary for utter self-driving, sometimes called Level Five.
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: Elon is going to make going to [self driving] not as big of a scary thing for the public. which should be good
Ten/20/2016 Kalanick: Got to get software runnin
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: Amen
Ten/20/2016 Kalanick: What do you think chances are he has Level five in 20% of a given city?
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: For effortless city
Ten/20/2016 Levandowski: He’s trippin’ but might/will blame regulatory as to why it’s not available
Did Uber`s Cars Have Real Problems in San Francisco?
In December 2016, Uber launched a self-driving taxi service in San Francisco, without obtaining permission from the DMV. The program lasted only a week, and was dogged by reports of Uber`s sixteen cars running crimson lights. A single text from Levandowski to Kalanick, two days before Uber`s cars had their registrations revoked by the DMV, refers to the issue:
12/Nineteen/2016 Levandowski: Quick update on that special intersection in SF, we taped six crimson car violations within two hours
A source close to Uber`s operations says its engineers observed the intersection where Uber`s cars were said to have run the crimson light, and that this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated vehicles also violating the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its software was to blame.
This post was corrected on fifteen August two thousand seventeen to fix the context of a 12/Nineteen/2016 message and on sixteen August two thousand seventeen to correct the October text message dates.
Sapcorda Plans Centimeter-Scale GPS for Europe
Germany`s Bosch and Geo++, U-blox of Switzerland, and Japan`s Mitsubishi Electrified announced the establishment of Sapcorda Services last Tuesday, a joint venture to provide global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning services of centimeter-level accuracy via satellite transmission, mobile cellular technology, and the Internet.
E-ZPass Could Kickstart Wise Cities
Everyone likes the idea of a wise city. Traffic lights would automatically adjust to optimize traffic flow, you could find parking spaces without circling for hours, and enforcing speed thresholds wouldn`t require a cop on every corner.
The problem is that technologies presently underpinning these systems are often expensive, unreliable, or both. Cameras need pricey computer vision systems to know what they are looking at, and require cleaning, while sensors embedded in the road are too expensive to monitor all but the priciest parking catches sight of. And radars are good at measuring speeds, but poor at specifying individual vehicles.
Now researchers at MIT have designed a brainy city system that leverages the windshield tags used to sleek drivers` passage onto toll roads and bridges. E-ZPass tags in the eastern United States–and similar systems nationwide and around the world–are radio-frequency transponders that transmit a unique signal when queried at a certain frequency. That response is typically picked up by a reader mounted on a gantry over the highway, and the driver`s credit card is automatically charged.
However, Dina Katabi and Omid Abari at MIT realized that anyone could prod a transponder to emit its signal, simply by asking nicely. They have developed a petite solar-powered unit called Caroake that can measure the position and speed of up to twenty nearby vehicles that are tooled with E-ZPass transponders. Each Caroake unit presently costs around $100, albeit that figure would drop significantly if the units where produced in volume, say the researchers.
By putting Caroakes on every urban streetlight, the researchers envisage tracking the occupancy of every parking space, counting how many cars are waiting at every traffic light, and perhaps even catching every speeding vehicle. They are about to deploy six readers on public streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts to learn local traffic and parking patterns.
«There is meaty interest both from the city and from E-ZPass, who see this as a mechanism both to expand the functionality of a device that already exists in the vast majority of cars, and to make the city smarter,» says Katabi.
But the pilot involves much more than simply putting normal E-ZPass readers on poles. The highway readers use very directional antennas to ensure they are querying a single car at a time as it passes underneath them. That technology is both expensive and of limited use in a city, where you want a more holistic view of what is happening along each street.
Instead, the Caroake device activates all E-ZPass tags within a 30-meter range. «In a city, twenty or thirty cars might react at the same time, the signals collide and you get a real mess,» says Katabi. Fortunately, albeit all E-ZPass tags are meant to broadcast at nine hundred fifteen megahertz, in practice individual units tend to stray a little to either side of that frequency. The MIT system uses this so-called carrier frequency offset to separate the signals from one another.
Localizing each tag is another challenge. A pair of antennas in the system calculate the signal`s angle of arrival. For stationary cars, that is enough information to locate them in a parking spot. To track moving cars, two or more neighboring readers can work together to triangulate its position. Caroake units form an ad hoc mesh network with each other, and use a Wi-Fi or cellular LTE gateway to thrust data up to wise city servers.
In tests on MIT`s campus, the Caroake network could determine speed to within eight percent (about 1.6 to Four.8 kilometers per hour) and location to within four degrees, which was accurate enough to place cars in individual parking catches sight of.
Another worry for the researchers was that permanently querying the E-ZPass tags might run down their sealed, non-rechargeable lithium batteries. In normal use, where they might be queried just a few times a day, E-ZPass tags can last a decade. In a wise city, the same tag might be activated a hundred times daily, or more. «We ran experiments and found out that even if you query the transponders every 2nd, their batteries will still run for around ten years,» says Abari.
But the largest concern for many drivers is likely to be the privacy and security issues that come from being tracked across a city. In 2013, the Fresh York Civil Liberties Union found that city`s Department of Transportation had calmly deployed dozens of standard E-ZPass readers to measure traffic volumes and congestion. The Union called the department`s privacy policies at the time «vague and barebones.»
In their pilot tests, the MIT researchers will measure only the carrier frequency offsets of the transponders and not decode the identifying data bits. «We do not believe that [these] values can be mapped to the owners or used to infer any private information about them,» they wrote.
Of course, if E-ZPass tags were to be used for cash-free parking, they would have to link individual cars to their owners. Dina Katabi thinks that far from infringing people`s privacy, Caroake devices could enable fresh, convenient business models: «It could be used to pay for other services. For example, I could drive to a restaurant and be charged instantaneously, or get access to certain roads at certain times, like congestion charging.»
For those services to be available to everyone–and for the brainy parking and traffic systems to be most effective–every car will need an active transponder. Adoption rates are creeping up as states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania sunset cash toll booths in favour of E-ZPass, but they are still at only eighty to ninety percent.
Perhaps a fatter problem is that anyone worried about Caroake`s Big Brother implications (or who just likes to speed) could temporarily pop their tag in the metallic «read prevention» bag that E-ZPass provides with every unit. After all, clever cities will be home to slew of clever people.
Car Battery Breakthrough Claimed in Japan
Mitsubishi and GS Yuasa say they`ve developed a lithium-ion battery that will give electrified cars twice the range that today’s designs do, for the same cost. The report, in yesterday’s Nikkei Business Daily, adds that the battery will go into mass production in 2020.
Such a battery would at the very least assuage range anxiety among potential car buyers. It could even permit manufacturers to shrink the battery, and thus cut the car`s weight, energy usage, purchase price, and operating cost.
It`s the latest in a string of announcements that imply progress at least as prompt as the e-car`s fondest proponents have claimed. Last week, a consortium of German companies exposed plans to build a lithium-ion battery gigafactory to rival Telsa’s, with production slated to begin in 2019. And in June, Toyota–a company that had long talked up fuel cells as the natural successor to batteries–evidently switched direction by touting a fresh lithium-ion battery design using a solid electrolyte. Because this solid-state design would be less sensitive to fever, engineers should be able to pack cells more closely, cutting weight. The design might also permit for quicker charging. Also in June, Volvo said its next-gen models would all employ electrical drive, either alone or hybridized with a gasoline engine.
But as Matthew Eisler pointed out in this space last month, the projection is based on the cost per cell, leaving out the very pertinent metric of battery pack lifetime. That may not be much of a problem for your cell phone`s battery, given the brief lifetime of the phone. But nobody knows yet whether the fresh automotive lithium-ion batteries will need to be substituted before the car wears out.
Then again, it may not matter all that much. Range anxiety may turn out to be more a theoretical than a practical problem, particularly now that electrified cars are packing serious kilowatt-hourage.
A duo of years ago, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that even when a car`s batteries have lost thirty percent of their storage capacity, most people could make the trips they normally make. And that examine was based on the two thousand fifteen Nissan Leaf, which then had a range of just one hundred thirty five kilometers (83 miles). The fresh Chevrolet Bolt can go almost three times as far on a single charge.
Slight Street Sign Modifications Can Downright Idiot Machine Learning Algorithms
It’s very difficult, if not unlikely, for us humans to understand how robots see the world. Their cameras work like our eyes do, but the space inbetween the picture that a camera captures and actionable information about that picture is packed with a black box of machine learning algorithms that are attempting to translate patterns of features into something that they’re familiar with. Training these algorithms usually involves demonstrating them a set of different pictures of something (like a stop sign), and then eyeing if they can extract enough common features from those pictures to reliably identify stop signs that aren`t in their training set.
This works pretty well, but the common features that machine learning algorithms come up with generally are not «crimson octagons with the letters S-T-O-P on them.» Rather, they’re looking features that all stop signs share, but would not be in the least bit comprehensible to a human looking at them. If this seems hard to visualize, that’s because it reflects a fundamental disconnect inbetween the way our brains and artificial neural networks interpret the world.
The upshot here is that slight alterations to an photo that are invisible to humans can result in frantically different (and sometimes bizarre) interpretations from a machine learning algorithm. These “adversarial pictures” have generally required relatively complicated analysis and photo manipulation, but a group of researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and the University of California Berkeley have just published a paper displaying that it’s also possible to trick visual classification algorithms by making slight alterations in the physical world. A little bit of sploog paint or some stickers on a stop sign were able to loser a deep neural network-based classifier into thinking it was looking at a speed limit sign one hundred percent of the time.
Tesla Model three to Driver: Look Me in the Eye
Driver-facing cameras aren`t a fresh idea: Cadillac`s CTS Super Cruise uses an infrared camera to monitor your eyes for signs of inattention. So does Audi`s fresh A8, billed as the world`s very first car capable of Level three autonomy.
So you`d expect Tesla to put one in its fresh Model Three, given that it`s supposed to have all the hardware it`ll need for both Level three and Level four autonomy. (Level three requires the driver to be ready to take control, but Level four does not.)
The funny thing, however, is that the Model Trio`s driver-oriented camera isn`t turned on. In fact, its very presence wasn`t mentioned by the company or noticed by the auto writers who very first drove the car. So a peak of the hat goes to Fred Lambert, who confirmed the camera`s existence yesterday, in Electrotek.
According to Elon Musk, all that`s needed for full-bore self-driving power is an over-the-air software download. That, however, won`t come until regulators permit it. So don`t hold your breath. Same goes for actual, on-the-road autonomy for the Audi A8.
Another funny thing is the deliberate inclusion of what you might call sleeper hardware. You`re selling customers something that is of no use now, but will be–you say–later on. Sleeperware is something you don`t often seen in techland because of the rapid product turnover, but even cars practically never have it.
My very first encounter with sleeperware dates back to 1993, when my office upgraded to Macintosh computers that each had a little indentation right above the screen.
«What in the world is that,» I asked a colleague. «It`s a built-in microphone–they think computers will be used as communications devices,» he responded. Hah, I thought.
But it happened, and quick–within the working life of those 1993-era desktop machines. So maybe the Model three you`re driving will one day drive you.
Carmakers Take to the (Self-Driving) Test Track
Researchers from academia and industry took rails in experimental cars at a public test-track event in Teesdorf, Austria, last week, but the main draw may have been the other attendees.
The event gave smaller companies a chance to attempt out driverless technology on a collective large-scale test track. Formal vehicle testing on closed tracks can cost up to £1000 (US $1320) a day. «We thought we could do something that was a bit different: combine the chance for petite companies and university teams,» says event organizer Alex Lawrence-Berkeley, of Sense Media Group in London, England.