Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

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DRIVING THE MARKET Auto Companies Vie for Unmanned Dominance By Paul Godsmark and Gabriel Sniman Driverless Car HQ projects that Google will hit the million-mile mark with its driverless cars this year. Photo courtesy Google. Editor’s note: The following report on the commercial driverless car industry was contributed by the writers of Driverless Car HQ, an Australia-based website dedicated to driverless car news coverage. All opinions expressed belong to Driverless Car HQ. Just a couple of years ago, if you were to tell someone that fully autonomous cars could be on the road by 2020, you would have been laughed at. A few years back companies like GM, BMW and Mercedes were clearly on a slow but steady course toward the ultimate goal of unmanned driving. Ford released selfparking technology for the masses and other improvements steadily found their way into the ecosystem, but no one was even talking openly about autonomous technology as a thing for the immediate future. Universities and Google seemed to be simply getting on with their development programs, with the indication being that consumers would still need to wait decades to see this technology become road-bound. Only GM had dared to suggest, with deliberately vague terminology, that consumers might see this technology in the 2020s. Fast forward a couple of years and the latest competition seems to be about who will be first with fully autonomous systems. The race is hot and growing hotter still. In 2012, GM, Volvo, Lexus, Nissan and BMW/Continental indicated that by around 2020 they will have autonomous technology in their vehicles. Mercedes-Benz has emphatically stated that it will be first and has plans to release a semiautonomous vehicle in the latter part of 2013. Volvo plans to do it by 2014. Google has stated openly and repeatedly that its technology could be in public hands as soon as 2017. Do planners and politicians, businesses and the public have any idea quite what this means and how to use the next four years to prepare The Current State of Play Three companies have now been licensed by Nevada, the first state to introduce regulations. Google received the first infinity license plate “001” from Nevada, with Continental following with “007.” Following this, Audi became the first automaker to gain an infinity plate. The race certainly seems to be heating up. Michigan has made it very clear that it now wants autonomous vehicle laws, thus following Nevada, Florida, California and impending legislation in Texas. The North American automakers have traditionally seen Michigan as the center for automotive development. Yet, times are changing. Nissan has challenged the status quo by moving its autonomous research center to Silicon Valley in California, because that is where the artificial intelligence expertise key to this technology located. If Google truly is ahead because of its AI expertise, then this makes sense. Improving cars is increasingly becoming a software problem, rather than hardware. Where else but Silicon Valley But, despite all this, the automakers still seem intent on following their 130-year-old, tried-and-true business 18 MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013
model of incremental improvements, currently moving to semiautonomous technology with plans to, at some point, offer full autonomy if people really want it. Many automakers still insist that the goal is not unmanned driving, but assisted driving that relieves the pressure from humans when they need it. But, with statistics showing that young people are gaining their licenses at an increasingly older age and less and less are choosing to own a car, it seems that driving has become an irritating distraction for many. For some, it takes away valuable time from social media and Internet browsing in general — the growing addiction of this second decade of the 21st century. Google Domination So, is Google ahead of the automakers Through Driverless Car HQ’s own research, mostly assisted by Google’s own search engine, we have counted 28 California-plated self-driving cars, including eight Toyota Prius vehicles and 22 Lexus RX450hs, in addition to several in Nevada. So common are they that many commuters around the Bay Area have informed Driverless Car HQ reporters that they see the Google driverless cars on a weekly basis. In August Google announced on its official blog that its vehicles had completed more than 300,000 miles on public roads. In September Google had completed more than 50,000 miles consecutively without any safety critical human intervention. Now, with 30 vehicles on the road and a fleet that is rapidly expanding, the quantity of miles driven is set to balloon. Driverless Car HQ expects Google to reach the magic million-mile figure at some point around mid 2013. This number is significant, given the claim of Stanford’s Bryant Walker Smith that Google would need 727,000 miles without human intervention to demonstrate that there is 99 percent confidence that their vehicle will be Automakers have yet to publicly demonstrate the level of autonomy shown in DARPA’s 2007 Urban Challenge. Photo courtesy DARPA. safer than a human being. None of the automakers have released figures on miles tested on public roads, although Audi and Continental needed to achieve at least 10,000 miles to satisfy Nevada’s licensing requirements. Bridging Technology Gaps Lidar seems to be Google’s silver bullet in achieving these advances so quickly. Many observers see lidar as the gold-standard technology if you want to achieve as close as possible to 100 percent confidence of object recognition. Of the automakers, Driverless Car HQ has seen Velodyne’s spinning lidar on GM and Toyota vehicles (for more information, see Page 16 of the winter 2012 Mission Critical: Sensors issue). Audi and Continental are likely using German company Ibeo’s much smaller lidar units or similar sensors. There have been some impressive results with the vision-based systems from Mercedes and BMW, but it is clear that the technical gap to fully autonomous driving cannot currently be bridged using vision alone. There may well be breakthroughs in this area in the next few years, but at the moment anyone that is serious about fully autonomous functionality has to be using a lidar-based system. In many ways the public progress announced by the automakers has been impressive, with selfparking Audis and Toyotas fitted with intelligent transportation system technology traveling autonomously around the company’s test track. Mercedes, Volvo and BMW are all on the cusp of releasing semiautonomous technology which will handle a high proportion of the driving workload in certain prescribed driving environments, either at low speed when congested or at high speed on freeways. But, and it is a big but, the automakers have not demonstrated anything publicly that approaches MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013 19
Page 1 and 2: VOLUME 3 NO.2 • May 2013 • AUVS
Page 3 and 4: CONTENTS VOLUME 3 NO.2 • May 2013
Page 5 and 6: Editorial Vice President of Communi
Page 7 and 8: Essential Components Someday, Will
Page 9 and 10: STATE OF THE ART OXFORD, U.K. Unive
Page 11 and 12: Self-driving trucks take to the roa
Page 13 and 14: Orlando2013_Rotor_ad_LISA_REV_Layou
Page 15 and 16: Technology Gap Driving Down the Cos
Page 17 and 18: Q & A for the infrastructure to com
Page 19: TIMELINE 2005 - DARPA reconvened fo
Page 23 and 24: THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF UNMANNED AIR
Page 25 and 26: Testing Testing The industry can ad
Page 27 and 28: Spotlight Fleet Automation Forum Wo
Page 29 and 30: End Users Is Your Guy Fraker Driver
Page 31 and 32: 12-15 August Walter E. Washington C

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