Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions

When will self-driving vehicles become common?

By 2025
1
3%
By 2030
9
25%
By 2035
13
36%
By 2040
8
22%
Only after the arrival of AGI
5
14%
Never
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 36

weatheriscool
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Post by weatheriscool »

New algorithm helps autonomous vehicles find themselves, summer or winter
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-alg ... inter.html
by California Institute of Technology

Without GPS, autonomous systems get lost easily. Now a new algorithm developed at Caltech allows autonomous systems to recognize where they are simply by looking at the terrain around them—and for the first time, the technology works regardless of seasonal changes to that terrain.

Details about the process were published on June 23 in the journal Science Robotics.

The general process, known as visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN), was first developed in the 1960s. By comparing nearby terrain to high-resolution satellite images, autonomous systems can locate themselves.

The problem is that, in order for it to work, the current generation of VTRN requires that the terrain it is looking at closely matches the images in its database. Anything that alters or obscures the terrain, such as snow cover or fallen leaves, causes the images to not match up and fouls up the system. So, unless there is a database of the landscape images under every conceivable condition, VTRN systems can be easily confused.
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Time_Traveller
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Post by Time_Traveller »

Lip-Reading By AI Self-Driving Cars Is Either Alarming Or Ingenious
Jun 30, 2021

Spy movies used to include a pivotal moment involving a secret agent that would surreptitiously read the lips of someone seated at a table while behind a pane of glass such as in a distant restaurant or high-rise building. Upon cleverly deciphering the mouthing words of what the person was saying, the secret agent would finally know the truth about a crucial matter.

Such is the glory of being able to do lip-reading.

The ability to read lips is considered a vaunted skill and one that can be challenging to master. This capability to do speech reading is pretty tricky in a myriad of ways.

First, you need to be able to visually see the lips of the person that you are trying to decipher. That might seem like an obvious requirement, but the point is that sometimes the lips are not particularly easy to see. The person doing the speaking might have their hands up toward their mouth, partially covering their lips from view. You see this happen intentionally in baseball games when the catcher goes out to the mound to chat with the pitcher, and they both cover their mouths with their baseball gloves.

Besides trying to see the lips of a speaker, it really makes quite a difference if you can also see their entire mouth, their teeth, their jaw, their head, their neck, and so on. Turns out that the delivery mechanisms of speaking are apt to entail all of those anatomical elements. Lips alone are somewhat limiting in terms of discerning what someone is saying.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot ... ingenious/
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weatheriscool
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Autonomous excavators ready for around the clock real-world deployment

by Baidu
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-aut ... world.html
Researchers from Baidu Research Robotics and Auto-Driving Lab (RAL) and the University of Maryland, College Park, have introduced an autonomous excavator system (AES) that can perform material loading tasks for a long duration without any human intervention while offering performance closely equivalent to that of an experienced human operator.

AES is among the world's first uncrewed excavation systems to have been deployed in real-world scenarios and continuously operating for over 24 hours, bringing about industry-leading benefits in terms of enhanced safety and productivity.

The researchers described their methodology in a research paper published on June 30, 2021, in Science Robotics.

"This work presents an efficient, robust, and general autonomous system architecture that enables excavators of various sizes to perform material loading tasks in the real world autonomously," said Dr. Liangjun Zhang, corresponding author and the Head of Baidu Research Robotics and Auto-Driving Lab.

Excavators are vital for infrastructure construction, mining, and rescue applications. The global market size for excavators was $44.12 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow to $63.14 billion by 2026.

Given this projected market increase, construction companies worldwide are facing hiring shortages for skilled heavy machinery operators, particularly excavators. Additionally, COVID-19 continues to exacerbate the labor shortage crisis. Another contributing factor is the hazardous and toxic work environments that can impact the health and safety of on-site human operators, including cave-ins, ground collapses, or other excavation accidents that cause approximately 200 casualties per year in the U.S. alone.
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Yuli Ban
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Elon Musk Didn't Think Self-Driving Cars Would Be This Hard to Make
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that making a self-driving car was harder than he expected, after the company's timeline for its latest Full Self-Driving (FSD) software slipped again.

Self-driving was a "hard problem" that "requires solving a large part of real-world AI," Musk tweeted.

"Didn't expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect," he said.

He also said that the latest version of Tesla's FSD beta software would be shipped soon. "I swear!" he added.

FSD, which doesn't make a Tesla car fully autonomous, currently costs a one-off $10,000, and was released in beta to some Tesla owners in October. It has all the features of Tesla's Autopilot — which brakes, accelerates, and steers automatically — plus it allows cars to change lanes, park themselves, and recognize stop signs and traffic lights.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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SAIC Motor says it will put Robotaxis capable of L4 self-driving on roads in China this year
Chinese automotive design and manufacturing company SAIC Motor says it will launch 40 to 60 Robotaxis capable of Level 4 self-driving throughout Shanghai and Suzhou before the end of 2021. The bold statement was made by Zu Sijie, vice president and chief engineer of the company, during this year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

SAIC Motor Corporation Ltd. is a Chinese state-owned automotive company based in Shanghai, and one of the largest automakers in the country. Electrek has previously covered SAIC-owned brands like MG Motor, but SAIC also produces vehicles in China through joint ventures with companies like Volkswagen and GM.

Now, SAIC is apparently expanding its automotive portfolio to include digital transportation in the form of autonomous Robotaxis. This news comes as a surprise from a more traditional automotive company, diving into a nascent space flooded with Chinese startups and major tech companies like Baidu and its Apollo Robotaxi.

In the US, startups like Cruise and Waymo paint a similar picture, while companies like Tesla carve their own unique path toward full self-driving.
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Yuli Ban
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Fully Self-Driving Cars Being Tested On Streets Of New York City
Fully self-driving cars are now being tested on New York City streets.

Two Ford Fusion models were specially customized by Mobileye, an Israeli firm owned by Intel.

The company received a special permit allowing its test drivers to keep their hands fully off the steering wheel while the cars drive themselves.
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Yuli Ban
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
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Ford's vehicles to offer autonomous ride-hailing through Lyft
By Nick Lavars
July 22, 2021
Back in 2017, Ford made a significant investment in an artificial intelligence startup called Argo that harbored big ambitions in the self-driving vehicle space. The pair are now bringing Lyft into the fold in an effort to deploy autonomous ride-hailing on a commercial scale, with the first rides to take place later this year.

Ford teamed up with Argo AI hoping to combine its own expertise in vehicle manufacturing with the startup's specialist knowledge in robotics and artificial intelligence. The automaker sees Lyft and its network as the ideal means to deploy the self-driving vehicle technology it has developed in the interim, and its self-driving cars will start taking passengers on the Lyft network in Miami later this year.

“This collaboration marks the first time all the pieces of the autonomous vehicle puzzle have come together this way,“ says Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Green. “Each company brings the scale, knowledge and capability in their area of expertise that is necessary to make autonomous ride-hailing a business reality.”
https://newatlas.com/automotive/argo-fo ... iling-yft/
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andmar74
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Post by andmar74 »

FSD V 9.1 is out. Looping behavior.



FSDBeta 9.1 - 2021.4.18.13 - Unprotected Left Turns with Drone View - Looping behavior
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