Automated vehicles
Will driverless cars make you queasy?
With as many as one in three Americans experiencing motion sickness, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan has been conducting a unique project to understand what makes people carsick and explore how to make passengers more comfortable in driverless cars.
driverlessguru.com“One of the great promises of autonomous vehicles—to give us back time by freeing us from driving—is at risk if we can’t solve the motion sickness problem.”
Monica Jones, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute
Wet weather testing in the Sunshine State
Waymo announced this week that it will begin testing its self-driving vehicles in Florida in time for hurricane season, when Miami becomes one of the wettest cities in the US. The firm will initially test its vehicles' sensors on a closed track in Naples, before manual testing on public roads in Miami, as it gathers data about real-world driving situations in heavy rain.
The company has also revealed it is making a high-quality multimodal sensor dataset for autonomous driving available to researchers, comprised of data collected by Waymo's self-driving vehicles.
medium.com
Self-driving Toyota to escort Olympic flame
According to an article in Digital Trends, Toyota's involvement in the forthcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics will include the torch relay leading up to the games, in which one of its Concept-i self-driving cars will be used. However, it may be a stretch to assume the famous Olympic flame will be carried autonomously on its travels around Japan; the article says that it's currently "unclear if the car will drive itself".
digitaltrends.com
Yandex explores 10-fold increase in driverless car fleet
Russia's Yandex is considering plans to expand its fleet of self-driving cars to up to 1,000 within the next two years, reports Reuters. The company, which hopes to start testing 100 of its self-driving cars on roads by the end of this year, reportedly hopes to use the enlarged fleet to speed up tests of its self-driving technology.
reuters.com
KBR, NASA and AWS partner on autonomous vehicle race
Interns from NASA and professional services and technologies provider KBR recently competed to race fully autonomous vehicles during the 'DeepRacer' event at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The vehicles were developed using reinforcement learning, an advanced machine learning technique, and participants were rewarded for speed and accuracy for staying on the course. KBR collaborated with NASA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to stage the event.
kbr.com
Opinion
Autonomous vehicle myths explored
Former BP chief executive Lord Browne has penned an article for The Washington Post addressing five key myths about autonomous vehicles. The ideas challenged as myths include the suggestion that self-driving cars will fix city congestion, the belief that autonomous vehicles will reduce our environmental impact and worries that driverless cars will lead to the shutdown of the car insurance industry.
washingtonpost.com
Investment
Porsche invests in sensor start-up TriEye
Porsche has become a strategic investor in sensor developer TriEye, which provides short-wave infrared sensor technology for vehicles fitted with advanced driver assistance systems or autonomous driving functions. TriEye says that its technology improves a vehicle's ability to see in weather conditions where visibility is poor, such as dust, fog, murky conditions or rain.
porsche.com
Starship expands autonomous delivery robot scheme at universities
In an interview with TechCrunch, Starship Technologies CEO Lex Bayer shares the company's plans to extend the number of university campuses served by its autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. The company claims to have made 100,000 commercial deliveries and, as it adds $40 million in Series A funding, has plans to expand its robot delivery fleet to 100 university campuses over the next two years.
techcrunch.com
And finally...
China tests self-driving cars on mountain highway
China has dedicated a mountainous stretch of highway in eastern Shandong province for testing connected, self-driving vehicles as part of the country’s efforts to challenge the US in autonomous driving technology, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the paper, quoting Xinhua News Agency, the 26-kilometre-long test section of highway is a typical mountain road with three tunnels, a bridge and three toll stations, providing different testing scenarios for autonomous driving and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.
scmp.com