Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions

[wjfox]

^ More info:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/2406 ... china-town

[wjfox]

Pioneer or ‘guinea pig?’ Central Texas highway testing tech for driverless trucks

Thu, February 15, 2024 at 1:00 PM GMT

AUSTIN (KXAN) – There’s a decent chance you’ve traveled next to a self-driving 18-wheeler on a Texas interstate.

The reason you may not have noticed, said Mike Arellano, is because they travel with backup drivers sitting in the seats — not controlling the wheel but ready to take over in case of a problem. Arellano is the Austin deputy district engineer with the Texas Department of Transportation and is helping lead the charge to keep up with — and enhance — the technology used in vehicles on Texas roads.

TxDOT is rolling out a “smart freight corridor” on a 21-mile stretch of State Highway 130 from Georgetown to Del Valle, Arellano explained.

[...]

Independent of the smart-corridor project, two major companies behind self-driving big rig technology told KXAN they plan to remove safety drivers and go completely driverless by the end of the year.

https://news.yahoo.com/pioneer-guinea-p ... 00418.html

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

Self-driving cars: the revolution that wasn’t?

published 3 days ago

Researchers have been trying to build autonomous vehicles since the 1960s – first for military use, and more recently for civilians.

To their proponents, these vehicles will revolutionise the way we get around, allowing drivers to relax behind the wheel as artificial intelligence, guided by cameras and censors, leads them to their destinations.

Motoring and tech companies such as Google's Waymo and General Motors (GM) have invested vast sums (a combined £78.9 billion between 2010 and 2021 alone, according to some estimates) in trying to make self-driving a reality.

Yet for all the grand promises made by the likes of Tesla's Elon Musk, who in 2016 claimed that autonomous driving was "basically a solved problem", self-driving cars and lorries are not yet a common sight on our roads; and as yet, no self-driving system has achieved the longed-for status of "full automation".

[...]

"You'd be hard-pressed to find another industry that's invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little," says the engineer Anthony Levandowski, a prominent critic of the technology.

https://theweek.com/science/self-drivin ... revolution

[spryfusion]

[weatheriscool]

Expert Says Tesla FSD 12.X Will Achieve Better Than Human Driving
March 7, 2024 by Brian Wang

James Douma is an AI expert and he believes that Tesla FSD V12.X will achieve better than human driving with more data and compute to refine the system. It will need 1% or less interventions than FSD V11. If interventions have been at 1 every drive then 1% interventions would mean one intervention every 3 months or 1 intervention every year.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/e ... iving.html

[weatheriscool]

Tesla FSD Car Data Infrastructure is Years Ahead
March 7, 2024 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/t ... ahead.html

Yesterday, AI Expert James Douma predicted that Tesla FSD version 12 would be able to eliminate 99% of the human interventions experienced in FSD version 11.

Technology analyst and investors Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner describe what they have learned about how Tesla gathers the data for FSD training.

Tesla tracks all of the best human drivers of Tesla cars.
The AI computer in the filters and determines which unusual situations were handled by the car and driver that day.
The useful training cases are returned to Tesla’s central systems after compression.
The FSD system is measuring the pixels of the video with the good driver behavior. The label is the good driver behavior.
The rate of improvement is 5-10X per month faster.

[weatheriscool]

Big Tesla FSD Version 12.3 Releasing Now
March 12, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/b ... g-now.html

Elon Musk says that the FSD beta version is a big release that should be called version 13.

AI expert James Douma expects the Tesla version 12.X all neural net system will be able to improve rapidly and eliminate the problems for 99% or more of the interventions needed in version 11. The speed of improvement without hardcoding has been reported as ten times faster than in early 2023.

[spryfusion]

Scaling Waymo One safely across four cities this year

Later this year, Waymo One will be offering rides to the public in four major cities.

Starting tomorrow, March 14, our fully autonomous ride-hailing service will be available to select members of the public in Los Angeles. And after starting initial rider-only testing in Austin last week, we plan to offer Waymo One to Austinites later this year.

This exciting news was shared by Waymo co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana, during a featured session at SXSW today in Austin, Texas.

“Once an unimaginable future, autonomous driving is now a real-world way of getting around for tens of thousands of people each week,” said Mawakana. “After achieving key milestones in each city, we're so excited to bring the safety, comfort and delight of our Waymo One service to more people in Los Angeles and Austin this year.”

[caltrek]

SwRI Develops Off-road Autonomous Driving Tools Focused on Camera Vision
March 12, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) SAN ANTONIO…Southwest Research Institute has developed off-road autonomous driving tools with a focus on stealth for the military and agility for space and agriculture clients. The vision-based system pairs stereo cameras with novel algorithms, eliminating the need for lidar and active sensors.

“We reflected on the toughest machine vision challenges and then focused on achieving dense, robust modeling for off-road navigation,” said Abe Garza, a research engineer in SwRI’s Intelligent Systems Division.

Through internal research, SwRI engineers developed a suite of tools known as the Vision for Off-road Autonomy (VORA). The passive system can perceive objects, model environments and simultaneously localize and map while navigating off-road environments.

The VORA team envisioned a camera system as a passive sensing alternative to lidar, a light detection and ranging sensor that emits active lasers to probe objects and calculate depth and distance. Though highly reliable, lidar sensors produce light that can be detected by hostile forces. Radar, which emits radio waves, is also detectable. GPS navigation can be jammed, and its signals are often blocked in canyons and mountains, which can limit agricultural automation.

“For our defense clients, we wanted to develop better passive sensing capabilities but discovered that these new computer vision tools could benefit agriculture and space research,” said Meera Towler, an SwRI assistant program manager who led the project.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1037315

caltrek: Off road to include the surface of other planets. Now that is what I call really off road.