Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions

[weatheriscool]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... o-resigns/

After robotaxi dragged pedestrian 20 feet, Cruise founder and CEO resigns
GM-owned Cruise "failed to disclose" full video and key crash details, DMV said.
Jon Brodkin - 11/20/2023, 12:07 PM

The CEO of self-driving car firm Cruise resigned yesterday following an accident in which a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. California officials accused Cruise of withholding key information and video after the accident, and the company's self-driving operations are on hold while federal authorities investigate.

"Today I resigned from my position as CEO of Cruise," co-founder Kyle Vogt wrote in a post on twitter.com. "The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future," he also wrote.

Cruise is owned by General Motors, which bought the company in 2016. Vogt expressed optimism about Cruise's future without him, saying the team is "executing on a solid, multi-year roadmap and an exciting product vision."

"As for what's next for me, I plan to spend time with my family and explore some new ideas. Thanks for the great ride!" Vogt wrote.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GM acquired a majority stake in Cruise when it was a startup in 2016. The company invested to take 80% stake in the company in May 2021.

Vogt attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a co-founder of Twitch, an interactive livestreaming service for content including gaming, entertainment, sports and music. Amazon acquired Twitch for about $1 billion in 2014.

https://apnews.com/article/cruise-gm-vo ... 82e8e16c2f

[spryfusion]

[weatheriscool]

Tesla recalls nearly all vehicles sold in US to fix system that monitors drivers using Autopilot

DETROIT (AP) — Tesla is recalling nearly all of the vehicles it sold in the U.S., more than 2 million across its model lineup, to fix a defective system that’s supposed to ensure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.

Documents posted Wednesday by U.S. safety regulators say the company will send out a software update to fix the problems.

The recall comes after a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into a series of crashes that happened while the Autopilot partially automated driving system was in use. Some were deadly.

The agency says its investigation found Autopilot’s method of ensuring that drivers are paying attention can be inadequate and can lead to foreseeable misuse of the system.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/tesla-autopi ... ca46eb3002

[spryfusion]

[Time_Traveller]

Driverless cars: Tech possible for UK motorways by 2026, transport secretary says

11 hours ago

Driverless cars could be on some UK roads by the end of 2026, the transport secretary has told the BBC.

Mark Harper also said he expected to see the owners of those vehicles being able to travel without having to watch where they're going by the end of that year.

Last month the government announced plans for new legislation to bring automated driving to UK roads.

But, critics argue if the tech is not ready it could cause serious accidents.

Mr Harper told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he has personally seen the technology being used in California adding he wants people to have "confidence" in a proper safety regime.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67825617

[weatheriscool]

Tesla FSD 12.1 Drives Smoothly Like a Good Human Driver
January 2, 2024 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/t ... river.html

Here is a review of Tesla FSD 12.1. FSD 12.1 has single-stack end-to-end neural nets trained with millions of video clips for the driving controls.

The car drives more like a human.

You’re driving in the fast lane (left) of a two-lane highway because slower cars stay in the right lane. Then a faster car approaches from behind. FSD v12 signals, safely switches to the slower lane, lets the faster car pass, then switches back into the fast lane and stays there.

Speed control is much smoother and appears to adjust itself smoothly with the surrounding traffic flow.

FSD v12 is more patient and assertive during lane-changing maneuvers. There’s no more “middle-of-the-change hesitation” (changing mind in the middle of a lane change).

[spryfusion]

Waymo to start testing robotaxis on Pheonix metro freeways
Source: Axios

Waymo will start testing their autonomous vehicles on Valley freeways in the coming weeks, the company announced Monday.

Why it matters: Waymo currently operates its ride hailing service across 225 square miles in metro Phoenix, but only uses surface streets. Adding freeways can cut down drive times by 50%, per the company.

What's happening: For more than a year, Waymo's Jaguar I-PACE vehicles have driven autonomously on freeways including Loop 101 and Loop 202, spokesperson Sandy Karp told Axios. A safety specialist sits behind the wheel.

• Later this month, Waymo employees will be able to drive on the freeway in "rider-only" mode. The program will start outside of rush-hour periods and ramp up to 24-hour service.
• This "incremental approach" is similar to how the company tested and launched its current ride-hailing service service, Karp said.

[weatheriscool]

Tesla Full Self-Driving (Beta) V12.1.2 Customer Deployment Started
January 21, 2024 by Brian Wang

Tesla has been testing Full Self-driving Beta V12.X with 50,000 employees for a few weeks but has now begun staged rollout for Tesla FSD buyers with HW4.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) v12 is a milestone in autonomous driving technology. It uses end-to-end neural networks, which are AI networks that can be used for everything from vehicle input to output. These new networks can replace more than 300,000 lines of explicit code.

Elon Musk said that FSD v12 would remove the beta designation. IF this happens at the end of the staged deployment, then Tesla would be able to recognize about $2 billion in deferred revenue.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/a ... arted.html

[Time_Traveller]

Tesla set to erase $70 billion in valuation after Musk's sales warning

January 25, 2024 6:36 PM GMT

Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab tumbled nearly 11% on Thursday after CEO Elon Musk warned sales growth would slow this year despite price cuts that have already hurt margins and raised investor concerns at the world's most valuable automaker.

Musk said growth would be "notably lower" as Tesla focuses on a cheaper, next-generation electric vehicle to be made at its Texas factory in the second half of 2025, which is expected to spark the next boom in deliveries.

But his remarks fell flat with investors, with Tesla set to lose about $70 billion in market value, if losses hold. That would push its market capitalization loss for the month to about $200 billion.

"The Tesla headlines have essentially gone from bad to worse," said TD Cowen analysts, noting that the fourth-quarter revenue and profit were also below expectations.

Shares of other EV makers also fell, with Rivian Automotive Inc (RIVN.O), opens new tab, Lucid Group (LCID.O), opens new tab and Fisker (FSR.N), opens new tab down between 4.7% and 8.8%.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos- ... 024-01-25/

[spryfusion]

[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.