Archinect - News

Where cars learn how to drive like people

2017-08-28T15:02:00-04:00

Even within the polygon abstraction of the simulation the AI uses to know the world, there are traces of human dreams, fragments of recollections, feelings of drivers. And these components are not mistakes or a human stain to be scrubbed off, but necessary pieces of the system that could revolutionize transportation, cities, and damn near everything else.

Waymo is Google's self-driving technology company that was launched in 2009. Since developing 'world’s first and only fully self-driving ride on public roads' in 2015, they've introduced fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans and started an early rider program which invites residents in Phoenix, AZ to join a public trial of self-driving vehicles that shapes the cars' evolution.

The Atlantic got to tour the company's training campus, Carcraft, reporting on the complex system behind the smart cars' learning environment where the digitization of the real-world driving takes place. There, single driving maneuvers and scenarios—like one car cutting off the other on a roundabout—are amplified into thousands of simulated scenarios that probe the edges of the cars' capabilities, forming Waymo's AI simulation apparatus.

The cars are training in both—the virtual and the real world, driving over 8 million miles per day through the fully modeled, digital versions of Austin, Mountain...

Pittsburgh disappointed with Uber's self-driving car experiment

2017-05-23T11:58:00-04:00

When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. [...] Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. [...] The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and others.

"Starting later this month," wrote Bloomberg less than one year ago, "Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved." Since then, Pittsburgh appears to have fallen out of love with the ride-sharing giant's promises for the city.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the future of transportation: "We had to do something different."

2016-10-28T13:49:00-04:00

Car and Driver caught up with Foxx in Pittsburgh. The DOT chief, previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected on the promise of autonomous and connected cars, the recent Smart City Challenge, the massive increase in traffic deaths, the potential of the shared vehicles unfolding right outside the window, and more. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for grammar and brevity.

LA City Councilman David Ryu calls for rapid roll-out of autonomous vehicles

2016-09-22T13:38:00-04:00

“Ask any Los Angeles resident about L.A.’s greatest challenges and the answer will most likely include: ‘traffic’,” begins David E. Ryu, the L.A. City Councilman for the 4th District, in a call for the rapid implementation of autonomous vehicles in the city.

Citing their potential to reduce traffic, “create greater transportation equity”, and reduce vehicular deaths, Ryu proposes that the Department of Transportation quickly put together a report on the benefits of implementing autonomous transit.

“In the 20th century, Los Angeles’ streetcars and freeways each set national standards and propelled our quality of life and economy forward,” writes Ryu. “Today, we are mired in gridlock, and it is time once again for our city to lead the way, this time into the 21st century as the trailblazer on autonomous vehicle technology."

For more on autonomous vehicles, check out these articles:

Uber lets you hail its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this month

2016-08-19T14:54:00-04:00

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot [...] But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.

Related stories recently in the Archinect news:

Imagining the future cyberattack that could bring down New York City

2016-06-21T14:46:00-04:00

Copycat attacks sprang up around the world: trains going haywire in Japan; smart thermostats freezing pipes in Minneapolis; Chinese hackers noodling around a water utility in San Francisco. Americans suddenly realized that, although they had spent plenty of time anguishing about how to protect the country’s physical borders, with every device they bought, they had been letting more and more invaders into their cities, their homes, and their lives.

"They had moved everything they did online, thinking they were moving into the future; they woke up the morning after thinking they’d moved into a war zone instead."

This is a great work of speculative fiction that imagines a cyberattack that brings down New York City in the near-future. Self-driving cars smash into the roadside, hospital staff can't access their records, power plants go offline causing mass blackouts.

The article's subheading reads "A scenario that could happen based on what already has." And, indeed, most of the technology described is already in use.

The automation of cars, homes, and entire cities means IRL hacks are a real threat. For more on this, check out Archinect's interview with Joseph Grima of Space Caviar about the RAM House, a prototype dwelling equipped with "airplane mode."

For tips and tricks on how to shore up your cybersecurity, take a look at this handy beginner's guide specifically tailored to architects. And for more content related to changing not...

How autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawl

2016-06-21T13:21:00-04:00

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles.

What are the ethics of self-driving cars?

2016-05-19T12:45:00-04:00

Philosopher Jason Millar claims to have originated the idea of the ethically challenged self-driving car in a 2014 paper on robotics... In the “The Tunnel Problem,” Millar’s driverless car (let’s call her Porsche again) is fast approaching a narrow tunnel, the entrance of which is blocked by a child who has fallen in the roadway. The car can either kill the kid or hit the wall of the tunnel, killing the driver (who is really just a passenger).

"Millar insists programmers need to build such scenarios into their code. I imagine them writing something like this:

if (kid_in_tunnel > 16) {
    kill kid_in_tunnel;
lp “We are sorry for your loss.”;
}
  else {
    kill ass_in_Porsche;
lp “Serves you right, schmucko.”;
}"

For more on the fast-approaching world of self-driving automobiles, check out these links:

Faraday Future holds groundbreaking ceremony for $1B Nevada factory

2016-04-14T12:27:00-04:00

Electric car company Faraday Future held a groundbreaking ceremony for its $1 billion manufacturing facility outside Las Vegas this afternoon, attended by Nevada governor Brian Sandoval, North Las Vegas mayor John Lee, and a host of other officials. There wasn't any actual "ground" broken, though, really — Faraday still needs to grade the land, which it says it will do "soon."

[...]

"Faraday's VP of Global Manufacturing Dag Reckhorn says that they are "moving extremely quickly for a project of this size" — a 3 million square-foot factory on 900 acres that the company claims will bring 4,300 jobs to the region over a decade — with plans to build in just two years instead of the normal four."

Watch the cached livestream here (video starts at 32:59):

Listen to our recent One-to-One conversation with Richard Kim of Faraday Future:

For more on the future of self-driving automobiles, check out these links:

How prepared are American cities for the new reality of self-driving cars?

2016-04-07T19:51:00-04:00

Everything from sidewalks and curbs to streets, building designs, urban layouts, and living patterns will change as computers take the wheel. “We’re looking at the broader urban effects—and urban opportunities—of this technology,” says Illinois Tech architect Marshall Brown, one of the team members in the Chicago school’s Driverless Cities Project. “It’s in the news a lot, but nobody’s been discussing what it will actually do to cities.”

World's first fully autonomous taxi service will arrive in Singapore later this year

2016-04-06T12:58:00-04:00

[nuTonomy's] Level 4 autonomous vehicle "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip;" all you have to do is provide a destination and (possibly) open and shut the doors. Google's autonomous cars, in contrast, are currently at Level 3, with limited self-driving automation [...] [nuTonomy] is building into [its] decision-making engine the ability for cars to actually violate the rules of the road when it's necessary to do so

Multitasking Musk: the busy life of Elon Musk

2015-12-16T13:35:00-05:00

Elon Musk has plenty of other ideas. If anyone asks and he has a moment to explain, he'll talk distractedly of as-yet-unrealized concepts—a vertical takeoff-and-landing supersonic electric jet for long-distance travel; an entirely new form of transport that he's named the Hyperloop... He is a man with the rare problem of having more ideas for how to radically change our world than the time to realize them. Still, you do what you can. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits.

Related:

Adapting self-driving cars to the world of humans

2015-12-04T11:34:00-05:00

The short history of autonomous vehicles has already shown us that in a closed environmement, cars that drive themselves are pretty great...the problems only begin when you introduce them to real world, non-autonomous environments [...] So Google's new patent makes sense: it contains some new idea on how the cars can communicate with pedestrians on the road as a kind of replacement for all the hand-waving and other non-mechanical signals used by drivers in road situations.

In theory, driving mainly consists of looking through glass, turning a wheel, and putting pressure on one of two pedals. But, as everyone knows, in practice, driving means swerving to avoid tires on freeways, slamming on brakes to escape collisions, waving with your hand to signal to the driver at the stop sign to please, just go first. (I know we both got to the line at the same time. Seriously, you go. No? Not going to go? Fine, I'll go. Oh – nevermind, now you're going. Really?)

So it's not really a surprise that intelligent, rational self-driving cars have difficulty on streets overcrowded with irrational, hubristic humans. Most significantly, self-driving cars will have to be able to drive on city streets teeming with pedestrians. If pedestrian-automotive relations already seem bad, imagine trying to jaywalk in a city filled with robo-cabs.

To deal with this, Google has patented a slew of new ideas, including a "physical signalling system" that would comprise some kind of mechani...

The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban design

2015-11-12T15:43:00-05:00

The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment...

"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"

As self-driving cars gradually integrate themselves into urban society, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG spotlights emerging lidar (light + radar) scanning technologies that the cars use to navigate. He weighs the possible advantages and risks that these technologies — which still have their vulnerabilities — can pose on the built environment.

More recent news about driverless cars on Archinect:

Tokyo's 2020 Olympics won't have Zaha, but it's looking like there will be "Robot Taxi"

Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot function

Milton Keynes invests in driverless cars over public transit infrastructure

Can a loss of driver autonomy save lives?