210 Just ordinAry robots
real life to show their actual performance. In such practice, Google
(Section 5.5.1) and the Free University of Berlin, with its project
AutoNOMOS (Section 5.5.2), are already experimenting with
autonomous cars.
5.5.1 Google
In 2010, it was announced that Google would undertake research
on autonomous vehicles (see Figure 5.4). According to Google
executives, the goal of the Google car was to “help prevent traf-
c accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by
fundamental changing car use.”* Google hopes that the develop-
ment of the car will ultimately contribute to better trac ow and a
reduction in the number of accidents and estimates that the annual
number of 1.2 million casualties in the entire world can be reduced
to half by the autonomous car.
*
http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html.
F 015 luxury in motion 14B1495
14C1450_057
14C1450_067
Figure 5.3 The F015 Luxury in Motion of Mercedes-Benz. (Photo courtesy of Daimler AG.)
211who drives the CAr?
Meanwhile, the company has driven seven autonomous cars on
Californian public roads, six Toyota Prius and one Audi TT. Legal
nes were avoided by the positioning of the drivers’ hands just over
the steering wheel, ready to intervene in case of problems. e vehicles
have driven over 1.13 million accident-free kilometers, apart from one
incident that occurred while a car was being driven manually,* since
2011, and have mastered staying in a lane and maintaining speed on
the highway. Now that the Google cars have mastered highway travel,
researchers are addressing the complexities of driving on a city street.
†
Before putting these cars on the road, Google engineers drive along
the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. e
autonomous cars compare the data they are acquiring to the previously
recorded data to dierentiate between objects, for example, pedestri-
ans from stationary objects such as poles and mailboxes.
‡
Although we
can only speculate, Google is likely to maintain a continually updated
database of road data that car manufacturers will have to subscribe to
in order for their cars to drive autonomously.
§
*
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-self-driving-cars-get-in-their-first-
accident-2011-8.
†
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140528072025-142059068-don-t-
laugh-the-new-google-prototype-car-has-implications-for-your-business.
‡
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/articial-intelligence/how-google-
self-driving-car-works.
§
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-
autonomous-cars-are-smarter-than-ever.
Figure 5.4 The autonomous Google car. (Photo courtesy of Google.)
212 Just ordinAry robots
Early in 2011, Google started to lobby in the U.S. states of Nevada
and California about adjusting road trac regulations. According
to Google, autonomously driven vehicles should be legalized and
the ban on text messaging from moving autonomous cars should
be lifted. Meanwhile, four states in the United States have passed
a law that allows one to take to the road in a self-steering car.* In
Nevada, the Federal Department of Transportation Law has pro-
vided a designated area in which Google may perform these tests.
A second law that allows people to make a phone call or send a text
message while in the driver’s seat has, however, not been adopted.
On the roof of each car robot is a Velodyne 64-beam laser, “the
heart of the system,” that generates a detailed 3D map of the environ-
ment. A computer combines these data with data from Google Street
View, a GPS system, and a radar tted within the car. In addition,
next to the rearview mirror there is a camera that recognizes stop
signs and trac signals and helps detect pedestrians and cyclists. In
addition, the car features a number of in-car technologies such as a
stop-and-go system.
In June 2014, Google ocially announced that they had built their
very own prototype self-driving car. It is a radical design in which the
normal conguration of a car is changed, since it lacks a steering wheel
or pedals and is operated by pushing a button to start and stop (see
Figure 5.5). It is designed to be used in urban settings at up to 40km/h
(or 25 mph).
†
Google had planned to run a small pilot with this proto-
type in California, but it has been blocked by the new testing rules of
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, which require a driver to be
able to take “immediate physical control” of a vehicle on public roads if
needed. at means the car must have a steering wheel and brake and
accelerator pedals.
‡
While Google has been at the forefront of developing and testing self-
driving technologies, it is not alone in its driverless vision for the future.
Nissan, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., and automotive supplier
Continental expect self-driving cars on the road by 2020. TeslaMotors
*
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/Automated_Driving:_Legislative_
and_Regulatory_Action.
†
http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2014/05/just-press-go-designing-self-driving.html.
‡
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/21/a-car-without-a-steering-wheel-or-pedals-
not-so-fast-california-says/.
213who drives the CAr?
even claims that it will develop a mostly autonomous car, which can
handle 90% of driving duties by 2016.* In the following section, we will
discuss another initiative of an autonomous car developed by the Free
University of Berlin as a remotely controlled community taxi.
5.5.2 AutoNOMOS and the Remotely Controlled Community Taxi
Since 2011, an autonomous car has also been driven in Berlin; it is
called Made in Germany (see Figure 5.6) and is the successor to the
*
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/10/09/will-teslas-d-be-a-self-driving-car.
Figure 5.5 Google’s new prototype autonomous car. (Photo courtesy of Google.)
Figure 5.6 The self-steering car Made in Germany. (Photo courtesy of Autonomos-Labs, Freie
Universität Berlin.)
214 Just ordinAry robots
Spirit of Berlin, which participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge
in 2007. e car, a modied Volkswagen Passat, the result of the
AutoNOMOS car project, was subsidized by the German govern-
ment and implemented by the Articial Intelligence Group of the
Free University of Berlin.* e car has six stationary and one rotating
laser scanner, seven radar sensors, four video cameras, and an infrared
camera in order to get the fullest view of the environment. e devel-
opers have been awarded a license to carry out car tests on the roads in
the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. e next goal of the developers
is to drive the car across Europe.
A breakthrough in the AutoNOMOS project is that the car now
drives smoothly, giving the impression that a person is driving the car,
and the initial problem of sensitivity loss that robots typically have,
which results in a jerky ride, has been remedied.
e most notable development is that you can order the car with
your smartphone. e developers thus demonstrate a clear vision of
the future. e idea is that cars should vanish from the road when
they are not driving. In the developers’ view, future cars should
remain in central parking lots until an order call is made. As soon as
the call is received, the car, a driverless taxi, sets o for the customer’s
location and then picks up the customer and takes him/her to a des-
tination specied by the customer by smartphone. During the trip,
customers can read, work, eat, talk on the phone, watch a lm, or
send e-mails. e car’s system may be able to decide whether it picks
up other customers it encounters with a matching destination on the
planned route. ere is no need to park—the vehicle zooms o to pick
up another customer (see also Burns, 2013).
According to the researchers, in a city like Berlin, given the tie-in
with existing public transportation, driverless taxi mobility can meet
the personal mobility needs of the population with a eet whose size is
approximately 10% of the total number of passenger vehicles currently
in operation in Berlin. is corresponds with the results of Burns etal.
(2013). In a Singapore simulation, Spieser etal. (2014) found that a eet of
250,000 robotaxis could replace all modes of personal transportation and
fulll the transportation needs (including private and public cars, taxis,
scooters, buses and trains, etc.) of the entire populationofSingapore.
*
http://autonomos.inf.fu-berlin.de/.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.