Autonomous Archives - Business Intelligence Info

Tag Archives: Autonomous

EU report warns that AI makes autonomous vehicles ‘highly vulnerable’ to attack

February 22, 2021 Big Data

The dream of autonomous vehicles is that they can avoid human error and save lives, but a new European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) report has found that autonomous vehicles are “highly vulnerable to a wide range of attacks” that could be dangerous for passengers, pedestrians, and people in other vehicles. Attacks considered in the report include sensor attacks with beams of light, overwhelming object detection systems, back-end malicious activity, and adversarial machine learning attacks presented in training data or the physical world.

“The attack might be used to make the AI ‘blind’ for pedestrians by manipulating for instance the image recognition component in order to misclassify pedestrians. This could lead to havoc on the streets, as autonomous cars may hit pedestrians on the road or crosswalks,” the report reads. “The absence of sufficient security knowledge and expertise among developers and system designers on AI cybersecurity is a major barrier that hampers the integration of security in the automotive sector.”

The range of AI systems and sensors needed to power autonomous vehicles increases the attack surface area, according to the report. To address vulnerabilities, its authors say policymakers and businesses will need to develop a security culture across the automotive supply chain, including for third-party providers. The report urges car manufacturers to take steps to mitigate security risks by thinking of the creation of machine learning systems as part of the automotive industry supply chain.

The report focuses on cybersecurity attacks with adversarial machine learning that carries the risk of malicious attacks undetectable to humans. The report also finds that the use of machine learning in cars will require a continuous review of systems to ensure they haven’t been altered in a malicious way.

“AI cybersecurity cannot just be an afterthought where security controls are implemented as add-ons and defense strategies are of reactive nature,” the paper reads. “This is especially true for AI systems that are usually designed by computer scientists and further implemented and integrated by engineers. AI systems should be designed, implemented, and deployed by teams where the automotive domain expert, the ML expert, and the cybersecurity expert collaborate.”

Scenarios presented in the report include the possibility of attacks on motion planning and decision-making algorithms and spoofing, like the kind that can fool an autonomous vehicle into “recognizing” cars, people, or walls that don’t exist.

In the past few years, a number of studies have shown that physical perturbations can fool autonomous vehicle systems with little effort. In 2017, researchers used spray paint or stickers on a stop sign to fool an autonomous vehicle into misidentifying the sign as a speed limit sign. In 2019, Tencent security researchers used stickers to make Tesla’s Autopilot swerve into the wrong lane. And researchers demonstrated last year that they could lead an autonomous vehicle system to quickly accelerate from 35 mph to 85 mph by strategically placing a few pieces of tape on the road.

[embedded content]

The report was coauthored by the Joint Research Centre, a science and tech advisor to the European Commission. Weeks ago, ENISA released a separate report detailing cybersecurity challenges created by artificial intelligence.

In other autonomous vehicle news, last week Waymo began testing robo-taxis in San Francisco. But an MIT task force concluded last year that autonomous vehicles could be at least another decade away.

VentureBeat

VentureBeat’s mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative technology and transact.

Our site delivers essential information on data technologies and strategies to guide you as you lead your organizations. We invite you to become a member of our community, to access:

up-to-date information on the subjects of interest to you
our newsletters
gated thought-leader content and discounted access to our prized events, such as Transform
networking features, and more

Become a member

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Pony.ai raises $100 million more to advance its autonomous vehicle tech

February 7, 2021 Big Data

Self-driving car startup Pony.ai today announced that it raised $ 100 million in an extension of its series C round. The funds bring the company’s total raised to date to over $ 1 billion at a post-money valuation of $ 5.3 billion, up from $ 3 billion as of February 2020.

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies. Despite needing disinfection, driverless cars can potentially minimize the risk of spreading disease. For example, Pony.ai says it’s delivered more than 15,000 packages of food and health kits in California during the COVID-19 health crises.

Former Baidu chief architect James Peng cofounded Pony.ai in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou, who worked at Google X’s autonomous car project before it was spun off into Waymo. The two aim to build level 4 autonomous cars — cars able to operate without human oversight under select conditions, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers — for “predictable” environments such as industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative deployment window of several years from now.

Pony’s full-stack hardware platform, PonyAlpha, leverages lidars, radars, and cameras to keep tabs on obstacles up to 200 meters from its self-driving cars. PonyAlpha is the foundation for the company’s fully autonomous trucks and freight delivery solution, which commenced testing in April 2019 and is deployed in test cars within the city limits of Fremont and Beijing in addition to Guangzhou.

Pony.ai, which has offices in Guangzhou, China and Fremont, California is one of the few companies to have secured an autonomous vehicle testing license in Beijing. In California, it has obtained a robo-taxi operations permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. The only other companies to have secured such a license in California are Cruise, AutoX, Aurora, Voyage, Waymo, and Zoox.

Last October, Pony.ai partnered with Via and Hyundai to launch BotRide, Pony.ai’s second public robo-taxi service after a pilot program (PonyPilot) in Nansha, China. BotRide allowed riders and carpoolers to hail autonomous Hyundai Kona electric SUVs through apps developed with Via, sourcing from a fleet of 10 cars with human safety drivers behind the wheel.

In August, Pony.ai inked an agreement with Bosch to “explore the future of automotive maintenance and repair for autonomous fleets.” Pony.ai and Bosch’s Automotive Aftermarket division in North America plan to develop and test fleet maintenance solutions for commercial robo-taxi programs. Pony.ai says it began piloting a maintenance program with Bosch in the San Francisco Bay Area in early July.

Among other potential advantages, autonomous driving promises the continuous operation of fleets and reduction of downtime. According to a 2017 McKinsey report, robo-taxis could reduce a fleet operator’s total cost of ownership by 30% to 50% compared with private vehicle ownership and by about 70% compared to shared mobility, significantly disrupting the market. But robo-taxis will need vastly different maintenance infrastructure than cars, in part because they might lack regular monitoring, have only minutes between passengers, and sport expensive, sensitive, and unconventional parts like lidar sensors.

Pony.ai has competition in Daimler, which in summer 2018 obtained a permit from the Chinese government that allows it to test self-driving cars powered by Baidu’s Apollo platform on public roads in Beijing. And startup Optimus Ride built out a small driverless shuttle fleet in Brooklyn. Waymo, which has racked up more than 20 million real-world miles in over 25 cities across the U.S. and billions of simulated miles, in November 2018 became the first company to obtain a driverless car testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Other competitors include Tesla, Aptiv, May Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro.

However, only Nuro, Waymo, and Cruise, and Argo rival Pony.ai’s fundraising. With the exception of Argo, all have raised more than $ 3 billion in venture capital at valuations ranging from $ 7.5 billion (Argo) to $ 175 billion (Waymo).

Fortunately for Pony.ai, it has partnerships with Chinese state-owned auto group FAW and GAC Group, a Guangzhou-based automobile maker, to develop level 4 robo-taxi vehicles. It also has a joint collaboration with On Semiconductor to prototype image sensing and processing technologies for machine vision. And Pony.ai has driven over 1.5 million autonomous kilometers (or about 932,056 miles) as of year-end 2019, putting it within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).

Brunei Investment Agency, Brunei’s sovereign wealth fund, and CITIC Private Equity Funds Management participated in the series C extension. Previous and existing investors in Pony.ai include Toyota, video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board’s Teachers’ Innovation Platform led this latest round, with participation from Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital, ClearVue Partners, Eight Roads, and others.

“Technological innovation is constantly transforming traditional industries, and autonomous driving will change traditional ways of transportation in the near future,” a CPE spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “CPE believes that Pony.ai will lead this trend, and will help it seize the opportunity for faster growth.”

VentureBeat

VentureBeat’s mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative technology and transact.

Our site delivers essential information on data technologies and strategies to guide you as you lead your organizations. We invite you to become a member of our community, to access:

up-to-date information on the subjects of interest to you
our newsletters
gated thought-leader content and discounted access to our prized events, such as Transform
networking features, and more

Become a member

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Nuro becomes first company to receive commercial autonomous vehicle permit from California DMV

December 24, 2020 Big Data

Hours after announcing that it acquired self-driving truck startup Ike, Nuro revealed it’s the first company to receive permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to charge a fee and receive compensation for its driverless delivery service. Unlike the autonomous testing licenses the California DMV previously granted to Nuro and others, which limited the compensation self-driving vehicle companies could receive, the deployment permit enables Nuro to make its technology commercially available.

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten adoption of autonomous vehicles for delivery. Self-driving cars, vans, and trucks promise to minimize the risk of spreading disease by limiting driver contact. This is particularly true with regard to short-haul freight, which is experiencing a spike in volume during the outbreak. The producer price index for local truckload carriage jumped 20.4% from July to August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most likely propelled by demand for short-haul distribution from warehouses and distribution centers to ecommerce fulfillment centers and stores.

The California DMV permit allows Nuro to use a fleet of light-duty driverless vehicles for a delivery service on surface streets within designated parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, including the cities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and Woodside. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and are only approved to operate in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour.

“This permit will allow our vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near our [Mountain View, California] headquarters in the Bay Area. Soon we will announce our first deployment in California with an established partner. The service will start with our fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by our custom-designed electric R2 vehicles,” Nuro chief legal and policy officer David Estrada wrote in a blog post. “We have extensively tested our self-driving technology and built a track record of safe operations over the past four years, including two successful commercial deployments in other states and driverless testing with R2 in the Bay Area communities where we plan to deploy.”

In April, Nuro, which has over 600 employees, secured a permit from the California DMV to test driverless delivery vehicles on public roads within a portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. That followed the issuance of a DMV permit in 2017 requiring that the company employ safety drivers in its autonomous test vehicles on public roads. More recently, in February, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) granted Nuro an autonomous vehicle exemption that allowed the company to pilot its custom-designed R2 delivery vehicles on roads without certain equipment required for passenger vehicles.

For the better part of a year, Nuro’s fleet of Toyota Prius vehicles in Houston, Texas has been making deliveries to consumers from various partners, including Kroger, Domino’s, and Walmart. The company has deployed over 75 delivery vehicles to date, a mix of self-driving Priuses and R2s.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Gatik raises $25 million for autonomous short-haul delivery trucks

November 23, 2020 Big Data

Gatik, a startup developing an autonomous vehicle stack for B2B short-haul logistics, today closed a $ 25 million series A round. The company also announced it will bring a fleet of self-driving vans to Canada as part of a deal with Loblaw, the country’s largest retailer with over 200,000 employees.

Palo Alto, California-based Gatik, which has offices in Toronto, is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon graduate and CEO Gautam Narang. He cofounded the company in 2017 with CTO Arjun Narang and chief engineer and former Ford computer vision lead Apeksha Kumavat.

Gatik’s platform taps level 4 autonomous vehicles (capable of operating with limited human input and oversight in specific conditions and locations, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers) to fulfill on-demand and scheduled deliveries up to a distance of 200 miles. Its retrofitted trucks and Ford Transit 350 vans and orchestration software, which the company has been testing on public roads in California since Q1 2018, promise to transport goods around city environments more affordably.

For Loblaw, Gatik says it will transport “multi-temperature” goods and products from the retailer’s microfulfillment centers for inventory pooling across multiple locations, multiple times a day, to retail outposts across the Greater Toronto Area beginning January 2021. The program will cover five routes that will operate 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Gatik’s fleet of Class 1-6 autonomous vehicles moves goods from microfulfilment centers and dark stores to pick-up points like retail stores, distribution centers, and offices — known as the middle mile,” Gatik head of policy and communications Richard Steiner told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “This is critical because the middle mile is the most expensive and challenging part of the supply chain for retailers to contend with. … The key to Gatik’s success involves optimizing fixed, predetermined routes, such as those used along the supply chain’s middle mile, countless times each day. The biggest threat to the autonomous revolution is the unknown, or edge cases, which are substantially reduced on fixed journeys.”

In July, Walmart revealed that it had launched a pilot with Gatik to ferry customer orders between select store locations in Bentonville, Arkansas. Gatik’s vans transport items from a warehouse to neighborhood market stores along a two-mile route (or five-mile one-way route) in Bentonville. Each van makes up to 10 runs a day during daylight, with human backup operators behind the wheel.

More recently, Gatik received a $ 100,000 grant from PlanetM, a Michigan Economic Development Corporation program that seeks to fund solutions to pandemic-driven challenges in Michigan. In collaboration with an unnamed partner, referred to as “one of the state’s largest retailers,” Gatik says its autonomous trucks will operate on predetermined, fixed routes throughout Grand Rapids and Rochester.

Gatik says it will continue to target customers such as third-party logistics providers (like FedEx, UPS, and USPS), consumer goods distributors, food and beverage distributors, medical and pharmaceutical distributors, and auto parts distributors for the foreseeable future. The company has raised a total of over $ 29 million in venture capital. Today’s round was led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from FM Capital, Intact Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Dynamo, Reilly Brennan’s Trucks VC, Intact Ventures, and AngelPad.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Via partners with troubled May Mobility for autonomous shuttle pilot in Arlington

November 18, 2020 Big Data

Via today announced a partnership with troubled autonomous vehicle startup May Mobility to develop a platform that integrates on-demand shared rides, public transportation, and transit options for passengers with accessibility needs. May says it will adopt Via’s autonomous fleet platform to power booking, routing, passenger and vehicle assignment and identification, customer experience, and fleet management. The longer-term strategy involves multiple public transit deployments in 2021, starting with Arlington, Texas.

By all appearances, May Mobility was a scrappy success story. But a VentureBeat investigation revealed that May engineers struggled to maintain and upgrade the company’s vehicle platform, at one point spending months attempting to install an air conditioning system in the height of summer. Leadership’s ambition often outstretched May’s ability to deliver, which upset vendors, some of whom went unpaid for stretches of time. And not a single one of the company’s commercial routes approached full autonomy.

Despite this, Via plans to forge ahead with the deal. In collaboration with the city of Arlington and supported by a $ 1.7 million U.S. Federal Transit Administration Integrated Mobility Innovation Program grant, on-demand autonomous vehicle rides from May will be incorporated into Via’s existing public transit service in the city. This service has been operational since 2017 and was extended in October 2020.

“Via is a leading provider in on-demand transit services, with a software stack to create efficient, highly-optimized on-demand autonomous vehicle solutions,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “May Mobility selected Via as a partner to support the company’s shift from a focus on fixed route AV services to on-demand, and will leverage Via’s experience and technology to further develop its suite of autonomous vehicle capabilities in a new way.”

The one-year Via and May pilot program in Arlington, called Arlington Rideshare, Automation, and Payment Integration Demonstration (RAPID), is expected to launch for the public in March 2021. The companies say it will serve downtown Arlington and the University of Texas at Arlington campus, providing students and faculty with free rides during the test phase, all integrated into Via’s app.

Beyond Arlington, Via and May plan to expand access to full-scale autonomous transit networks in 2021, in coordination and partnership with public transit systems in a number of locations across the U.S. “Via’s partnership with May Mobility will integrate flexible, autonomous vehicle fleets into public transit today and will provide insights to support cities as they transform public transit infrastructure for the future,” Via cofounder and CEO Daniel Ramot said.

May’s post-deployment road has been bumpier than most, but some of its rivals haven’t fared much better. In February, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) partially suspended U.S. operations of France’s EasyMile after a passenger in Columbus, Ohio was injured while riding in one of the company’s driverless shuttles. And in 2018, the NHTSA suspended a separate Transdev program in Florida that sought to replace school buses with EasyMile vehicles.

The Department of Transportation two years ago published a prescient report on the autonomous shuttle sector that highlighted the limited vehicle autonomy, procurement challenges, and regulatory unpredictability shuttle startups have yet to address. The industry isn’t without apparent success stories, like that of Optimus Ride. But May’s setbacks illustrate the nascent technology’s limited applicability, particularly when stretched beyond its capabilities.

Best practices for a successful AI Center of Excellence:

A guide for both CoEs and business units Access here

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai raises $267 million at an over $5.3 billion valuation

November 6, 2020 Big Data

In a sign that enthusiasm for driverless cars hasn’t waned during the pandemic, Pony.ai today announced $ 267 million in new funding. The startup has offices in Guangzhou, China and Fremont, California and has now raised over $ 1 billion at a valuation north of $ 5.3 billion (up from $ 3 billion as of February 2020).

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies. Despite needing disinfection, driverless cars can potentially minimize the risk of spreading disease. But surveys are mixed, with one from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education showing nearly three in four Americans believe autonomous cars aren’t ready for prime time. Unsurprisingly, Motional disagrees with this assertion, claiming one-fifth of respondents to its Consumer Mobility Report are “more interested” in autonomous vehicles than they were before the pandemic.

Former Baidu chief architect James Peng cofounded Pony.ai in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou, who worked at Google X’s autonomous car project before it was spun off into Waymo. The pair aims to build level 4 autonomous cars — able to operate without human oversight under select conditions, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers — for “predictable” environments, such as industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative deployment window of several years from now.

Pony.ai is one of the few companies to have secured an autonomous vehicle testing license in Beijing. In California, it has obtained a robo-taxi operations permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. The only other companies to have secured such a license in California are AutoX, Waymo, and Zoox.

Among other potential advantages, autonomous driving promises the continuous operation of fleets and reduction of downtime. According to a 2017 McKinsey report, robo-taxis could reduce a fleet operator’s total cost of ownership by 30% to 50% compared with private-vehicle ownership and by about 70% compared to shared mobility, significantly disrupting the market. But robo-taxis will need vastly different maintenance infrastructure than cars, in part because they might lack regular monitoring; have only minutes between passengers; and sport expensive, sensitive, and unconventional parts like lidar sensors.

Pony.ai has competition in Daimler, which in summer 2018 obtained a permit from the Chinese government that allows it to test self-driving cars powered by Baidu’s Apollo platform on public roads in Beijing. And startup Optimus Ride built out a small driverless shuttle fleet in Brooklyn. Waymo, which has racked up more than 20 million real-world miles in over 25 cities across the U.S. and billions of simulated miles, in November 2018 became the first company to obtain a driverless car testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Rivals include Tesla, Aptiv, May Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro.

Fortunately for Pony.ai, it has partnerships with Chinese state-owned auto group FAW and GAC Group (a Guangzhou-based automobile maker) to develop level 4 robo-taxi vehicles. It also has a joint collaboration with On Semiconductor to prototype image sensing and processing technologies for machine vision. And Pony.ai has driven over 1.5 million autonomous kilometers (or about 932,056 miles) as of year-end 2019, putting it within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).

Previous and existing investors in Pony.ai include video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board’s Teachers’ Innovation Platform led this latest round, with participation from Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital, ClearVue Partners, Eight Roads, and others.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

U.S. NHTSA’s autonomous vehicle test tracking tool is light on data

September 3, 2020 Big Data

In June, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) detailed the Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing (AV TEST), a program that purports to provide a robust source of information about autonomous vehicle testing. Today marked the official launch of AV TEST after several months of ramp-up, beginning with a tool for tracking driverless pilots in 17 cities across nine states. But despite lofty promises from the NHTSA of the transparency AV TEST will herald, its current incarnation — at least from first impressions — is bare-bones at best.

Companies including Beep, Cruise, Fiat Chrysler, Nuro, Toyota, Uber, Local Motors, Navya, and Waymo have agreed to participate in AV TEST so far, along with those that have previously submitted testing information to NHTSA, including Aurora, Easymile, Kodiak Robotics, Lyft, TuSimple, Nvidia, and Zoox. The tracking tool reveals on-road testing locations and activity data like vehicle types, uses, dates, frequency, vehicle counts, and routes. And it shows information about state vehicle operation regulations, emergency response plans, and legislation, as well as links to the voluntary safety reports some vehicle operators publish.

The ostensible goal is to shed light on the breadth of vehicle testing taking place across the country. Owing to a lack of public data around autonomous vehicles, Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) reports a majority of Americans don’t think the technology is “ready for primetime.” The federal government maintains no database of autonomous vehicle reliability records, and while states like California mandate that companies testing driverless cars disclose how often humans are forced to take control of the vehicles, critics assert those are imperfect measures of safety.

“The more information the public has about the on-road testing of automated driving systems, the more they will understand the development of this promising technology,” NHTSA deputy administrator James Owens said during a web briefing. “Automated driving systems are not yet available for sale to the public, and the AV TEST Initiative will help improve public understanding of the technology’s potential and limitations as it continues to develop.”

U.S. NHTSA’s autonomous vehicle test tracking tool is light on data

Above: A screenshot of the AV TEST tracking tool.

Some of the AV TEST tool’s stats are admittedly eye-catching, like the fact that program participants are reportedly conducting 34 shuttle, 24 autonomous car, and 7 delivery robot trials in the U.S. But they aren’t especially informative. Several pilots don’t list the road type (e.g., “street,” “parking lot,” “freeway,”) where testing is taking place, and the entries for locations tend to be light on the details. Waymo reports it is conducting “Rain Testing” in Florida, for instance, but hasn’t specified the number and models of vehicles involved. Cruise is more forthcoming about its tests in San Francisco, but only approximates the number of vehicles in its fleets.

The incompleteness of the data aside, participation in AV TEST appears to be uneven at launch. Major stakeholders like Pony.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Argo.AI, Amazon, Postmates, and Motion seemingly declined to provide data for the purposes of the tracking tool or have yet to make a decision either way. The net effect is a database that’s less useful than it might otherwise be; while the AV TEST tool reports that there are 61 pilots currently active, the actual number is likely to be far greater.

It also remains to be seen how diligently NHTSA will maintain this database. Absent a vetting process, companies have wiggle room to underreport or misrepresent tests taking place. And because the AV TEST program is voluntary, there’s nothing to prevent participating states and companies from demurring as testing resumes during and after the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, NHTSA’s reliance on voluntary industry actions to accomplish this is a recipe for disaster,” Advocates for Highway Safety president Cathy Chase said of the AV TEST program earlier this summer. “It has been reported that at least 80 companies are testing autonomous vehicles. Yet, only 20 have submitted safety assessments to the U.S. DOT under the current voluntary guidelines, iterations of which have been in place for nearly four years … Additionally, over that time, the National Transportation Safety Board has investigated six crashes involving vehicles with autonomous capabilities uncovering serious problems, including inadequate countermeasures to ensure driver engagement, reliance on voluntary reporting, lack of standards, poor corporate safety culture, and a misguided oversight approach by NHTSA.”

Tellingly, the AV TEST program’s launch comes as federal efforts to regulate autonomous vehicles remain stalled. The DOT’s recently announced Automated Vehicles 4.0 (AV 4.0) guidelines request — but don’t mandate — regular assessments of self-driving vehicle safety, and they permit those assessments to be completed by automakers themselves rather than by standards bodies. (Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety also criticized AV 4.0 for its vagueness.) And while the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would create a regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles, dubbed the SELF DRIVE Act, it has yet to be taken up by the Senate. In fact, the Senate two years ago tabled a separate bill (the AV START Act) that made its way through committee in November 2017.

All of this raises the question of whether the AV TEST program will be able to move the needle on autonomous car safety. Time will tell, but today’s rollout doesn’t instill confidence.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit

August 27, 2020 Big Data

Bosch, Ford, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Leveraging Bosch sensors that monitor driving corridors and their surroundings to guide vehicles to and from assigned spaces, Ford plans to demo how cars like the 2020 Escape can self-drive to parking spaces without human drivers onboard.

The companies have no intention of extending the demo beyond the end of September, but they say they hope to gain “valuable insights” that will help expand the technology in the future. For instance, they claim the system could allow existing garages to accommodate up to 20% more vehicles because developers don’t have to leave space for drivers and passengers to open car doors in parking spots.

The autonomous parking valet — which the companies claim is the first of its kind in the U.S. — leans on a range of intelligent infrastructure supplied by Bosch, including lidar sensors and a dedicated server. Complementary in-car Ford technology converts commands from the server into maneuvers, enabling cars to drive themselves up and down ramps and spot potential hazards (including pedestrians).

Upon arriving at the garage, drivers will leave the test vehicle in a designated area and use an app to send it into an automated parking routine. They will use that same app to request the return of the vehicle to a designated retrieval zone.

Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit

Above: A Ford test vehicle autonomously backs into a parking space.

The system’s reliance on sensors makes it potentially less capable than, say, Tesla’s Enhanced Summon, which navigates cars autonomously through virtually any parking lot. But Enhanced Summon doesn’t support multi-story garages, and it can’t currently park vehicles autonomously — only retrieve them. By contrast, Bosch and Ford say their platform can be deployed via retrofitted solutions or with embedded infrastructure planned into the construction of new garages.

The pilot’s launch follows the rollout of Bosch and Daimler’s smartphone-controlled automated valet in the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart, which gained regulatory approval in July 2019 following an assessment by German certification authority TÜV Rheinland. That setup is identical to the one in Detroit; Bosch and Daimler began developing fully automated driverless parking in 2015, and in 2017, their pilot in the Stuttgart garage became capable of automated parking in real conditions. A year later, the two companies began allowing Mercedes-Benz Museum visitors to use the parking service live, accompanied by trained safety personnel.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

TuSimple plans autonomous truck network backed by UPS

July 1, 2020 Big Data

Ahead of the commercial rollout of its driverless trucks by 2024, TuSimple today outlined the launch of what it’s calling the world’s first autonomous freight network. In partnership with UPS, Penske, U.S. Xpress, and McLane Company, the company plans to establish an “ecosystem” of autonomous trucks complemented by digitally mapped routes, strategically placed terminals, and a monitoring system dubbed TuSimple Connect.

TuSimple says it believes the autonomous freight network is the “safest” and “most efficient” way to bring self-driving trucks to market. As the pandemic drives unprecedented growth in the logistics and ground transportation market, Aurora, Waymo, and other rivals are investing increased resources in fully autonomous solutions.

TuSimple’s autonomous freight network will roll out in three phases. During the first — spanning this year to 2021 — TuSimple will offer delivery service between the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The second phase, which will begin in 2022 and end in 2023, will see an expansion in shipping from Los Angeles to Jacksonville that will connect the East with the West Coast. The third phase, starting in 2023, will grow TuSimple’s driverless operations nationwide, adding routes in 48 states and allowing customers to use TuSimple-equipped trucks on the freight network (with priority given to existing customers and companies with large orders).

Similar deployments in Europe and Asia will follow if all goes well, building upon TuSimple’s delivery pilot in Shanghai. There, as here, businesses will pay TuSimple to haul goods on their behalf.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

TuSimple already operates autonomously on seven different routes between Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Dallas, and it intends to open a shipping terminal in Dallas in alignment with its freight network plans. For high-volume customers, TuSimple tells VentureBeat it will continue to map routes and deliver to distribution centers. And it says it will give clients of all sizes the ability to track freight in real time using TuSimple Connect.

To accelerate the network’s growth, TuSimple completed a series of 22-hour self-driving truck runs along the I-10, I-20, and I-30 corridors through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Leading up to today, the company was completing 50 commercial runs per week, and it now plans to conduct 93 commercial runs per week in the U.S., using 40 trucks.

Penske, which operates more than 750 service facilities throughout North America, has agreed to scale TuSimple’s fleet operations and provide maintenance and over-the-road service. U.S. Xpress and UPS will give TuSimple runs to haul for them, guiding which routes open next and enabling the company to further refine its autonomous technology.

TuSimple — which is reportedly seeking $ 250 million in new funding — is proposing an ambitious timeline, but it’s arguably better-positioned than most to deliver. The company recently expanded a freight-hauling pilot program with UPS to 20 trips per week, with additional routes between Arizona and Texas and El Paso and Dallas, and its trucks are performing revenue-generating trips for over a dozen customers, including Fortune 100 companies and “household names.” Moreover, TuSimple has R&D and testing centers globally in hotspots like Beijing, San Diego, Shanghai, and Tucson. It also has a war chest totaling over $ 298 million, with contributions from Sina, Nvidia, UPS, and Mando.

On the other hand, analysts like Boston Consulting Group’s Brian Collie now believe broad commercialization of autonomous cars won’t happen before 2025 or 2026, at least three years later than originally anticipated. Partly as a consequence of halted real-world vehicle testing, the coronavirus has delayed Lyft rival Waymo’s work by at least two months. Meanwhile, Ford pushed the launch of its driverless vehicle service from 2021 to 2022.

TuSimple’s Class 8 semi-trucks can carry loads exceeding 33,000 pounds and are level 4 under the guidelines penned by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), meaning they’re capable of full autonomy in controlled (and often geofenced) highways and local streets. Unlike self-driving perception platforms from the likes of Uber and Waymo, TuSimple’s is decidedly camera-forward. Using an eight-camera array and other sensors, it can detect cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles up to 1,000 meters away.

TuSimple says its approach enables it to achieve three-centimeter precision for truck positioning, even in inclement weather and at night, and it allows for plenty of leeway in real-time decision-making. It also claims better efficiency than its competitors. TuSimple says its trucks are able to monitor traffic flow far ahead to maintain a given speed more consistently than human drivers and competing autonomous vehicle systems. The company claims this reduces fuel consumption by as much as 15% and average purchased transportation costs by 30%.

TuSimple has plenty in the way of competition, like Thor Trucks and Pronto.ai. There’s also Ike, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Apple, Google, and Uber Advanced Technologies Group engineers that has raised $ 52 million. And then there’s venture-backed Swedish driverless car company Einride. Meanwhile, Paz Eshel and former Uber and Otto engineer Don Burnette recently secured $ 40 million for their startup, Kodiak Robotics. That’s not to mention Embark, which integrates its self-driving systems into Peterbilt semis and launched a pilot with Amazon to haul cargo, or driverless truck solutions from incumbents like Daimler and Volvo.

But demand for driverless trucks is strong. The industry stands to save the logistics and shipping industry $ 70 billion annually while boosting productivity by 30%. According to a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association, a quarter (26%) of consumers now view autonomous delivery technologies more favorably than before the health crisis. Besides cost savings, the growth is driven in part by a shortage of human drivers. In 2018, the American Trucking Associates estimated that 50,000 more truckers were needed to close the gap in the U.S., even despite the sidelining of proposed U.S. Transportation Department screenings for sleep apnea.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Waymo to expand autonomous truck testing in the American Southwest

June 30, 2020 Big Data

Today during a briefing with members of the media, Waymo head of commercialization for trucking Charlie Jatt outlined the company’s go-to-market plans for Waymo Via, its self-driving delivery division. In the future, Waymo will partner with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to equip cloud-based trucks manufactured and sold to the market with its autonomous systems. In addition, Waymo will work with fleets to provide its software services and offer support for things like mapping and remote fleet assistance.

As Waymo transitions to this model, Jatt said that Waymo intends to own and offer its own fleet of trucks — at least in the short term. One of the delivery solutions it’s exploring is a transfer-hub model where, rather than an automated truck covering an entire journey, it’ll be a mix of an automated portion and a portion involving manually driven, human-manned trucks. Automated vehicle transfer hubs close to highways would handle the switch-off and minimize surface street driving.

In a first step toward this vision, Waymo says it’ll soon expand testing on roads in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas along the I-10 corridor between Phoenix and Tuscon, as previously announced. It this year mapped routes between Phoenix, El Paso, Dallas, and Houston and ramped up testing in California on freeways in Mountain View, but the focus in 2020 will be on the American Southwest.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

Tests will be primarily along Interstates 10, 20, and 45 and through metropolitan areas like El Paso, Dallas, and Houston. Chrysler Pacifica vans retrofitted with Waymo’s technology stack will map roads ahead of driverless Peterbilt trucks as part of a project known as Husky.

Waymo is also engaged with local delivery under the Waymo Via umbrella, the company reiterated. It currently has two partnerships in the Phoenix area — one with AutoNation and one with UPS. On the AutoNation side, Waymo is performing “hot shot” deliveries where Waymo vehicles travel to certain AutoNation locations and deliver car parts. And on the UPS side, the company is ferrying packages from stores to UPS sorting centers.

Waymo began piloting dedicated goods delivery with class A trucks — 18-wheelers — in 2017. After completing tests in 2018 with real loads from Google datacenters in Atlanta, Waymo began limited testing on roads in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, and on Metro Phoenix freeways.

Waymo’s autonomous trucks employ a combination of lidars, radars, and cameras to understand the world around them. They have roughly twice as many sensors as Waymo’s cars to handle the trucks’ unique shape and the occlusions they cause, and they place a greater emphasis on long-length perception (the perception range is somewhere beyond 300 meters). But they use the same compute platform found in the fifth-generation Waymo Driver.

As the pandemic drives unprecedented growth in the logistics and ground transportation market, Aurora, TuSimple, and other rivals are investing increased resources in fully autonomous solutions. They stand to save the logistics and shipping industry $ 70 billion annually while boosting productivity by 30%; according to a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association, a quarter (26%) of consumers now view autonomous delivery technologies more favorably than before the health crisis.

Besides cost savings, the growth in autonomous trucking has been driven in part by a shortage of human drivers. In 2018, the American Trucking Associates estimated that 50,000 more truckers were needed to close the gap in the U.S., even despite the sidelining of proposed U.S. Transportation Department screenings for sleep apnea.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Tag Archives: Autonomous

EU report warns that AI makes autonomous vehicles ‘highly vulnerable’ to attack

VentureBeat

Pony.ai raises $100 million more to advance its autonomous vehicle tech

VentureBeat

Nuro becomes first company to receive commercial autonomous vehicle permit from California DMV

Gatik raises $25 million for autonomous short-haul delivery trucks

Via partners with troubled May Mobility for autonomous shuttle pilot in Arlington

Autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai raises $267 million at an over $5.3 billion valuation

U.S. NHTSA’s autonomous vehicle test tracking tool is light on data

Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit

TuSimple plans autonomous truck network backed by UPS

Waymo to expand autonomous truck testing in the American Southwest

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives