Sergey Brin on driverless car future

Californias driverless car law was signed by Governor Brown at Googles headquarters last week. During the ceremony, Sergey Brin talked about Google’s driverless car efforts.

Some highlights:
– Brin expects driverless cars to be available to the public in not more than 6 years
– Driverless cars to become available for testing to a larger subset of Google employees within one year
– Safety continues to be the core issue. Google is looking at all issues including hardware failures, tires blowing out, electronics failures, etc.
– Three pronged approach to testing: a) actual driving on the road, b) lab testing, c) testing on closed circuits
– Google working on improving the sensor arrangements (It would be interesting to know whether they have found ways to reduce the dependence on the extremely expensive LIDAR)
– Google does not intend to manufacture vehicles
– Google intends to work with partners in commercializing the technology
– Driverless cars will greatly reduce the waste of land for parking spaces because driverless cars can drop someone of and then transport another passenger (reading between the lines, this was the only hint about the business model which Google may follow. Fewer parking lots also means fewer privately owned cars and an increasing share of trips using driverless taxi service (think: ‘Google mobile’ (Brin did not use this term!)).
– Nobody else is as far ahead as Google in this field.

Below is a video of the signing event:

Google cooperates with German rails for travel planning

Do you think of Google as a mobility service provider? While it does not yet offer its own transportation services, it is establishing itself as the leading provider of travel planning services. The cooperation with Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s leading rail network, which was just announced last week, is only one of many examples which show that Google  relentlessly expands its travel-related services. By establishing interfaces to many established transportation services – including mass transit systems, trains and airlines – it raises the barrier to entry for potential competitors and the value of its competitive position.

Google’s autonomous vehicles fit nicely into this scenario. Once they are ready to be released to the public, Google can become a full-service mobility provider: It then has the technology and all information to pick its customers up anywhere and bring them to their destination in the most time- and cost-effective way. It will be able to anticipate transportation demand, to react to delays of trains and flights and to optimize the placement of its vehicles. Its intelligent fleet will change the economics of transportation and significantly lower the costs of personal mobility.

Taken together, Google maps, its travel planing services and its autonomous vehicle technology, provide a strong foundation for becoming one of the key players in transportation in the next decade. Google is preparing itself to capture a much larger share of the transportation industry’s revenue than the great auto makers anticipate today.

California to become the engine of the driverless revolution

We don’t know whether the Champagne corks will be flying at Google when California’s Gov. Jerry Brown signs the bill to legalize autonomous cars which was almost unanimously approved by the legislature on Wednesday. But Google’s intense lobbying efforts which started in Nevada have paid off: Now the internet giant is a big step closer to introduce autonomous cars on its home turf.

California is almost perfect for the introduction of autonomous cars. It is large and diverse enough to allow testing in almost all environments. There are regions  with almost optimal weather conditions such as Southern California (snow being very unlikely except in the mountains). This is where Google could launch their first commercial trials for car-sharing, taxi or truck/logistics services.

The second great asset of California is its hotbed of innovation and technology in Silicon Valley which Google is part of and which it profits from. But driverless technology could give another boost to the valley and lead to many new products and services based on autonomous technology. When driverless technology becomes the next big thing, Silicon Valley will be at the center.

Driverless cars are a golden opportunity for the ‘Golden State’. The legislature was right to ignore the objections from the auto industry (which is worried about their business model).

Thrun sounds cautious note on self-driving cars

We just came across an interesting interview by Sebastian Thrun, head of Google X and mastermind behind Google’s Driverless Car. In the interview conducted by Charlie Rose in late April he talks about Google’s project Glass, Udacity and driverless cars. He sounds a cautious note on the safety of autonomous cars. While the technology is already quite safe, he is still concerned about its capability of driving millions and millions of miles without error. He suggests that current driverless cars have not quite reached the perfomance level of an attentive human driver. In another interview with WIRED he also discusses the problem hinting, that the right combination between human and computer intelligence may need to be found to ensure maximum safety.
Are we right to conclude that Google’s driverless car team is finding it difficult to reach the intended safety level for their cars? From a statistical perspective it is very hard to prove that an autonomous vehicle can perform flawlessly for millions of miles. Just driving a few million miles in test mode is not enough.
So far Google has always emphasized that their driverless cars drive on known routes for which detailed navigation and localization data is available. Relying on stored information about a route, however, can be a major source of error. Therefore Google must also be working hard to run their cars without prerecorded mapping data. It would be interesting to know their progress in this area.
An additional approach for verifying the safety of their cars would be to develop a full-fledged simulator built around a physics engine which would be connected to the sensor and actuator interfaces of Google’s driverless car (for an early sketch of this approach, see our Innovation Brief (2010)). The driverless car control unit would receive sensor inputs generated by the simulator. These sensor inputs would be updated according to the simulated movement of the car depending on the signals received by the actuators. Building such a simulator would be a major challenge because of the large amount of sensor data which it would need to generate. But Google’s team has already collected much of the real-world data needed to populate the simulator.
The advantage of the simulator would be that the driverless car could be subjected to much more rigorous testing and that it would be much easier to detect and precisely test borderline situations. Invalid or problematic sensor data could be sent to the control unit, slippery surfaces, fog, rain and snow could be simulated by the physics engine. Unexpected behavior by vehicles, cyclists etc. could also be simulated and tested.

Truck driver shortage could become severe handicap (EU report)

A report on the situation of EU road transport warns that a shortage of truck drivers could become a severe problem if the economic situation in the EU improves. The report commissioned by the EU (published in June) proposes several measures including:

– Improve the truck driver’s image and career prospects
– Improve quality of work
– Reduce the entry barriers (license fees)
– Implement coach relays to ensure more drivers can stay home overnight

The report discusses several innovations that might be relevant to the profession but does not even mention autonomous vehicle technology. This is surprising because self-driving trucks would be an excellent starting point for autonomous vehicles as they would lead to high productivity increases (about 30 percent of total truck operating costs are driver wages). Risk could be minimized by operating on highways only – hauling long distance freight between select distribution centers. Human drivers could then distribute the freight locally.

The report should be seen as further evidence to encourage the introduction of driverless technology in transporation because it shows that few people consider trucking as their dream job (many of jobless Europeans are not willing to enter this profession) and because it reduces the worry about technology-induced job losses.

Wall Street Journal considers driverless future

An opinion piece in the WSJ on July 17 criticized investment in the proposed bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It then advocated preparing the road infrastructure for the advent of driverless cars: The number of lanes should be increased because driverless cars can cope with narrower lanes. Trucks should be limited to one or two wider lanes (ideally separate from car lanes). Traffic flow control systems would have to be installed to optimize traffic flow – both on the highway and in the city where stop lights often increase congestion.

The author points out interesting issues but fails to recognize the decentralized nature of the driverless revolution. These cars do not require modifications to the existing infrastructure. They will drive where a human can drive. But their behavior and economics differ. They will naturally improve the flow of traffic. Driverless cars increase the peak capacity of the existing infrastructure because they can safely keep shorter distances to other cars. Even a small percentage of driverless cars mixed into regular traffic can reduce congestion by adopting an optimal speed or by simply keeping side-by-side with another (automated?) car in two-lane pile-ups effectively preventing other cars from lane-hopping. The cost-structure of driverless car sharing and the need for demand management by mobility providers are also important factors that will reduce peak loads on the traffic infrastructure.

There is no need for driverless road infrastructure investment. Governments would be well advised, however, to invest directly into advancing driverless technology. Fewer traffic accidents would save hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Better road utilization exhibited by driverless cars will also greatly lower the costs for building and maintaining the road infrastructure.

 

 

 

Perfecting driverless cars on the race track

We just came across a talk by Chris Gerdes at the recent TEDxStanford conference. He is busy developing autonomous race cars. Driving these cars autonomously at their limit at high speed, difficult tracks and on slippery surfaces greatly helps improve the algorithms and could also be important to increase acceptance of this technology.
The team has is also carefully analyzing the behavior of professional race drivers to learn about optimal car handling in critical situations. They have gone so far as to equip race drivers with sensors to continuously measure their cognitive load while on the race track. Gerdes hopes to replicate some of the maneuvers that race drivers handle almost instinctively and with very little cognitive load.

Driverless technology may kill the auto insurance industry

A recent report by strategy consulting firm Celent (Boston) looks at the impact of advanced technology on the auto insurance industry. Based on a review of available and emerging safety technology – including collision avoidance, automated traffic law enforcement, telematics and robot cars – it provides estimates for the reduction of accidents. One of its scenarios predicts total auto industry premium to drop from 25 percent of total insurance industry premiums to only 13 percent by 2022. Most of these reductions will be due to available safety technology; fully autonomous cars will make their impact felt in the decade thereafter.

The report entitled ‘A scenario: The death of auto insurance‘ analyzes the adoption of advanced car technologies. It sees the first robot cars becoming available for private use in the time frame between 2018 and 2022. Between 2023 and 2027 the author expects driverless technology to become a preferred feature of high-end cars. Its adoption may be subsidized through tax incentives. The timeline ends in 2027; the report does not give an estimate for when driverless technology will be required in new cars.

The report asks the auto industry to actively prepare for this scenario. It recommends to

  • expect the largest impact in activity and budget levels for sales service and claims
  • begin monitoring the evolution of technology-induced changes in insurance losses
  • draft a strategy for  addressing the impacts (expand non-auto business, grow through mergers and acquisitions, accept shrinking revenues)

The report should also be a wake-up call to other industries which will be affected by driverless technologies. While some industries are at risk (including car dealerships, repair shops and auto manufacturers), it presents great opportunities to many others – which will be able to introduce completely new services and business models.

Japanese government aims to implement driverless technlogy

Realizing that traditional approaches for Intelligent Transport Systems may be outdated, the Japanese transport ministry has announced an initiative for an ‘autopilot’ driverless system which will be operated on highways. A first demonstration is planned for 2013; the whole system should be operational by 2020.The initiative will start with an expert forum on June 27 consisting of researchers and industry representatives (including Toyota, Honda, Nissan).

The autopilot system will operate within private cars. These cars will be driven manually on standard roads. Once the car reaches the highway, the autopilot can be activated. This will reduce accidents on the highway and reduce traffic jams. Still in the tradition of ITS, the ministry envisions that highways will need to be equipped with technology supporting the autopilot mode. This may include systems for controlling the traffic flow at on-ramps and in traffic jams.

Accelerating the pace of development for driverless technology is an excellent fit for the Japanese industry which already is a world leader in robotics technology.

Source:  Daily Yomiuri, Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure,  Transport and Tourism

Google trademarks logo for a car-sharing service

Google is moving ahead with its efforts to introduce driverless cars. On June 13 it submitted a smiling car icon for trademark protection at the US Patent and Trademark Office (application 85650611). The application does not provide explicit information about the intended use beyond a reference to autonomous driving, but it is obvious that the icon was primarily designed to show available cars in an online map. We have tried to anticipate what this could look like (see graphic below). Whereas Google’s car sharing service will be a natural fit with Google maps, we had to use OpenStreetMap for the graphic because of copyright issues.

The graphic shows Google cars available in Las Vegas; we don’t know yet where Google might ultimately launch a car-sharing service but Nevada has become the first state where key legal hurdles for the operation of autonomous cars have been removed.

Why is Google protecting the logo now? Unless Google has made much greater advances with its technology than is currently known, it is unlikely that an autonomous car sharing service operated by Google could be introduced before 2015. But Google could either be working on developing the software infrastructure for their future mobility services which would quickly lead to icon and logo issues. Or they could be contemplating starting (or buying) a conventional car-sharing service first. They would get first-hand experience and could gradually expand it into a driverless mobility service.

The logo is clear evidence that Google considers car-sharing as the primary business model for its driverless technology. It will not compete with established car makers heads on; instead it will change the fundamentals of personal mobility. Greatly reduced costs through car-sharing and increased flexibility will drive millions of customers away from private car ownership and into the service offerings of Google. Car-makers beware!