From
the Editors
At the mid-point of 2015, it is a good time
to reflect on the last
six months. We have seen a huge increase in
the level of interest in AVs compared to 12
months ago. One example is the fact that
Barrie and Paul have spoken at 20
conferences and events in the last 6 months
across Canada and in California. These
include the impact of AVs on municipalities,
transit, logistics, auto insurance,
policing, transportation, technology, aging,
the Internet of Things, fleet management,
etc.
There has also been a significant increase
in the number of articles in the print media
and social media, as well as on radio and TV
- many of which we have been interviewed
for. We have moved beyond discussing if AV's
will come, to addressing when will they
arrive on our roads and how will they affect
us.
One of the interesting aspects of AVs is the
way they will impact so many different
aspects of our lives and society. On the one
hand, it is exciting to be on the leading
edge of such huge changes. On the hand,
there is a human cost we must not ignore. At
a recent transit conference that Barrie
spoke at, a union official spoke calmly but
with feeling about the impact on transit
drivers and their families if drivers' jobs
are lost because of AVs. In this issue of AV
Update, there is also an article about a CBC
interview that Barrie gave on the use of
autonomous dump trucks in Alberta's oil
sands. A union official interviewed for the
same piece said "When you consider the
potential job loss, which could be up to 800
jobs on our work site, it's nerve
wracking."
Widespread
job losses can lead to social unrest, as we
have seen with the disruptive impact of Uber
in Paris, London and other cities. We
hope the federal/national, regional and
municipal governments will recognize that
jobs will be displaced and develop plans to
minimize the impact.
The Automakers, Tier 1s and AV Developers
Ford: Bloomberg
Business reports that Ford is moving the
development of its self-driving cars from
the research lab to its advanced engineering
operations, a sign that it'€s getting
closer to putting an autonomous auto on the
road. €For us, autonomous vehicles are
about making the technology accessible to
everyone, just as Henry Ford did with the
automobile a century ago€¯ said Raj Nair,
group vice president of global product
development. €Our team is now working to
make this technology feasible for
production.€¯ Ford did not say when it
expected to begin selling a car that can
drive itself, though Chief Executive Officer
Mark Fields has said the auto industry will
have a fully autonomous car on the road by
2020.
It's trivia time! Who is the largest
operator of autonomous vehicles? According
to Catherine
J.K. Sandoval, a California public utilities
commissioner at a recent event hosted by the
Federal Trade Commission, the answer is John
Deere. An article in the Washington
Post points out that for
years, "John Deere has been selling
tractors that practically drive themselves
for use on farms in America's heartland,
where there are few pesky pedestrians or
federal rules to get in the way." The
self-driving technology being sold by John
Deere and some of its competitors is
obviously less technically complex than the
fully driverless cars that big tech
companies and car manufacturers are working
on. And for now, the tractors are still
supposed to have a driver behind the wheel -
even if they never touch it. Because
farm-equipment makers (and mining and
forestry companies) operate almost
exclusively on private land, they've been
able to bring products to market much
quicker than automakers focused on the
consumer market - and without the same level
of regulatory scrutiny.
Uber: Robotics
Trends reports that the California Labor
Commission recently ruled a former Uber
driver should be classified as an employee,
not an independent contractor. This is a
move that could drastically reduce the
profitability of Uber, a fast-growing start
up that has a $40+ billion valuation. And it
also could be another boost for self-driving
cars, which have been on Uber's radar for
some time. Uber is adding hundreds of
thousands of drivers around the world each
month, and having to offer salaries, health
insurance and other benefits could be a huge
roadblock for the company. Self-driving
taxis would certainly eliminate the
company's top expense. Uber recently raided
the robotics department at Carnegie Mellon
University (CMU), recruiting some 40
researchers to come work at Uber to develop
self-driving taxis. For Uber, self-driving
cars can't get here soon enough.
Travis
Kalanick, CEO of Uber, has reputedly
said that “If Tesla can make cars
autonomous by 2020, he’ll buy 500,000 of
them.” If this is true, Uber’s
significant interest in an AV future
indicates just how much more potential there
is for very large amounts of money to start
flowing around the rapidly emerging AV
ecosystem.
Baidu: media company dna
(based in India) reports that Baidu, a
leading Chinese web services company, will
launch its own self-driving car later this
year. Baidu will team with a third party
automobile manufacturer to launch the
driverless car based on Baidu's computer
technology and artificial intelligence, said
Senior Vice President of the firm Wang Jin
at the China Cloud Computing Services
Summit. A series of technologies such as big
data, Baidu Map, artificial intelligence and
Baidu Brain will be applied to the
self-driving car. In addition, it will be
able to simulate the way the human brain
thinks.
A related article in The
Guardian reports that Baidu has been
working on autonomous vehicles for the past
couple of years and has recently partnered
with car makers including BMW. The two
companies have announced a self-driving
research project driving test cars around
the complex highways of Beijing and
Shanghai.
Tesla: Tesla's CEO Elon Musk told
shareholders Tuesday that he thinks fully
self-driving versions of his electric cars
could come to market in about three years.
The USA
Today article says that the first
version of the "autopilot," which
assists drivers with steering, will reach
the first group of customers in about a
month. Musk says he has been personally
testing the systems in a Model S electric
car. The three-year estimate, Musk says, is
when he thinks the technology will be ready.
It could take longer for government
regulations around the issue to go into
effect. He acknowledged that it will take
time for regulators to say "it's okay
to go to sleep in the car" -- maybe
another one to three years. He also said
that a computer that takes over a Tesla from
the driver will have to be proven to be at
least 10 times safer than a human driver.
Google is reaching out to its
Mountain View neighbours as part of a new
public-relations push. As reported by Future
Tense, the company launched a friendly,
explanatory home page for its self-driving
car project. The website includes sections
like €why self-driving cars matter, €how
they work,€¯ and €what Google is up to.€¯
The website also comes with a contact form
that asks people to report positive and
negative experiences they'€ve had while
sharing the road with Google'€s autonomous
vehicles. At the same time, Google published
the first of what it says will be monthly
progress reports on its self-driving car
project. Most notably, the inaugural report
includes summaries of all the accidents
Google'€s self-driving cars have been
involved in since the project began in 2009.
Google maintains that its self-driving cars
have not caused an accident over the course
of their 1.8 million miles of testing.
Staying with Google, their new
prototype vehicle is now officially being
tested on public roads near their Mountain
View headquarters. The vehicle is limited to
25mph and there are a total of 9 of these
according to the May monthly report that Google
recently published. This has made us
wonder; if the continuing delay in
California DMV regulations for the operation
of autonomous vehicles (originally required
for 1st January 2015) could end up delaying
any plans that Google may have for a pilot
program?
Google & Delphi: The media have
taken an interest in sensationalizing AV
related stories – and recent headlines
suggest all manner of safety concerns:
"A
Google self-driving car cut off a rival
self-driving car..", and "Two
self-driving cars avoid each other on
Californian roads". But both Delphi
and Google sought to add clarity to what
sounds like a very ordinary driving
situation between two vehicles; something
that we have all probably experienced on
numerous occasions ourselves.
Transit
/ Transportation
CAVCOE's Barrie Kirk spoke at the annual
conference of the Canadian Urban Transit
Association (CUTA) in Winnipeg, Manitoba in
early June. At this conference, CUTA
unveiled its Vision
2040 document. Sub-titled Five
years of progress, the document includes
a section on automated vehicles, a topic
that was not on the radar screen five years
ago when the last vision document was
prepared. The following is taken directly
from Vision 2040, and specifically Section
7.2, titled: Prepare for connected and
automated vehicles.
"The related development of
connected and highly automated vehicles can
be expected to have implications for the
design, operation and management of mobility
services within the coming decades.
Connected vehicles will primarily offer the
ability to run the services available today
in a more efficient, dynamic and safer
manner. Highly or fully automated vehicles,
on the other hand, have the potential to
radically transform transit in the longer-
term. It is possible to imagine
publicly-owned, or shared, self-driving
vehicles (akin to taxis) acting as part of
an urban mobility system. The transit
industry must pay particular attention to
these trends and develop the strategies
which will enable transit systems and
municipalities to take advantage of them.
While automated vehicles will not become the
only form of transit, their position within
a network of modes and services must be
taken into consideration.
"It is recognized that the long-term
transition towards the use of highly
automated vehicles will come with a range of
challenges and opportunities for cities and
transit agencies. The challenges include
developing a good understanding of how
travel demand will shift with the changes to
car ownership models, adopting new
legislation and regulation, hiring and
training a new qualified workforce and
adapting to different requirements for
infrastructure."
We congratulate CUTA on this vision and
articulating it so well. We hope that
all transit agencies will heed this advice
and include an analysis of the way AVs will
impact their master plans, operations, and
business cases for new transit-related
infrastructure.
AV
Trials
Singapore Is already
planning for a future of driverless taxis,
according to an article in Citylab.
Officials there are expected to authorize an
on-demand driverless taxi trial on public
roads — a concept that could change the
very nature of urban mobility, with shared
autonomous vehicles operating as a
point-to-point, on-demand transit system.
“For me, really the big benefit of this
technology is essentially making car-sharing
as convenient as private car-ownership, but
also as sustainable and scalable as public
transportation,” says Emilio Frazzoli,
lead investigator for the urban mobility
component of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for
Research and Technology (SMART), a research
consortium that’s applied to run the taxi
pilot.
According to PCWorld
there are now a total of 77 autonomous
vehicles licensed to drive on California
roads. Not surprisingly Google have the
majority with 48.
Government
/ Regulatory
The Ontario Ministry
of Economic Development, Employment and
Infrastructure has announced
that the Ministry will provide up to $1M to
the Ontario Centres of Excellence to support
innovative and commercially viable projects
through the Connected Vehicle / Autonomous
Vehicle (CVAV) program. Eligible
applicants include private companies,
partnerships among private companies, and
Ontario-based academic research teams.
Proposals may be submitted up to August
2015. This is a continuation of the
$1M that MTO provided in the first phase of
the program a year ago.
The US Congress is starting to address AVs.
An article in the National
Journal points out that as members of
Congress work on a long-term transportation
bill, they are increasingly thinking about
the future and how to make sure states are
incorporating new technology €and federal
agencies are prepared to regulate it. The
sponsors of the transportation bill say it
will ideally run for six years to give
states the ability to plan large
infrastructure projects (transportation
funding is currently set to expire in July).
The exact length will depend on funding,
which has not been settled. The article
points out that the length of the bill is no
small thing: Think of the changes that have
come since Congress last passed a long-term
bill in 2012. Fuel efficiency has improved
faster than expected, which has zapped the
Highway Trust Fund. Ride-sharing services
like Uber and Car2Go have also upended car
ownership, while GPS navigation is treated
as a given, not an add-on.
Other
AV Articles
An
item on CBC
Radio's Day 6 program that was also
carried by National Public Radio in the US
addressed the announcement by Suncor that it
will buy
175 driverless trucks for use in Alberta's
mining operations. The company plans to
replace its entire fleet by the end of the
decade. Day 6 got the reaction of two
stakeholders: CAVCOE's Barrie Kirk and Steve
Kelly, a union official Fort McMurray,
Alberta. Local union members
are concerned that the technology could lead
to the loss of hundreds of jobs. Barrie
pointed out that Suncor is right in
the mainstream. Autonomous trucks have been
in use in Australian mining operations for
some time. Similar to the John Deere item
above, it's a lot easier to design and
operate an autonomous truck on private
property like the oil sands than on a on a
public road. Trials show that computers
drive better and more safely than humans;
AVs save money on fuel; they save money on
maintenance costs because there's less wear
and tear; and the huge tires last longer.
Barrie and Steve agreed that there is an
important human element to all this and
that, unfortunately, there will be jobs
lost.
Technology
Much
of the technology that powers Google'€s
self-driving cars is rarely seen outside of
Google. Attendees at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
in Seattle got a rare glimpse into a new
safety feature the company is working on. An
article in IEEE
Spectrum describes a new pedestrian
detection system that works on video images
alone. Recognizing, tracking, and avoiding
human beings is a critical capability in any
driverless car, and Google'€s vehicles use
lidar, radar, and cameras to ensure that
they identify people within hundreds of
meters. But that battery of sensors is
(currently) expensive; in particular, the
spinning lidar unit on the roof can cost
nearly $10,000. Video cameras have their
issues. Visual information gives you a wider
view [than radars] but is slower to process.
Solving this would allow autonomous
vehicles to reliably locate humans using
cheap cameras alone; this would lower their
cost and, hopefully, usher in an era of
safer robotic driving.
An article in Insurance
Journal reports on a recent KPMG report
that says that insurers are unprepared for
self-driving car disruption: The
majority of property/casualty insurers do
not expect autonomous or self-driving
vehicles to have a real impact on their auto
insurance business for another decade and
have not adjusted their business models to
prepare for the disruption. Many insurer
executives also believe that government will
slow the introduction of autonomous
vehicles. According to KPMG, few
insurance carriers have taken action—not
due to doubts about the possible
ramifications, but rather because most
believe the change will happen far into the
future, if at all. In fact, 84 percent of
executives don’t expect autonomous
vehicles to have a significant impact on
their business until 2025, while 42 percent
expect a significant impact in six to 10
years. However,
the KPMG analysts
think these executives surveyed for the
study are mistaken. “The
disruption of autonomous vehicles to the
entire automotive ecosystem will be
profound, and the change will happen faster
than most in the insurance industry
think,” said Jerry Albright, principal in
KPMG’s Actuarial and Insurance Risk
practice, said in a release on the survey.
Upcoming
AV-related Events
July
21-23, 2015: AUVSI / TRB Automated
Vehicles Symposium 2015, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, USA.
September 6-9, 2015: IEEE
Vehicular Technology Conference; Boston,
USA
October 5-9, 2015: ITS
World Congress, Bordeaux, France
November 3-5, 2015: Unmanned
Systems Canada 2015 Conference; Halifax,
Nova Scotia
October 29 - November 2, 2017: ITS World
Congress, Montreal, Canada
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