March 26, 2018

Uber Halts Autonomous Car Tests After Fatal Crash in Arizona ⁰

by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: ALPHABET INC-CL A, Arizona, auto industry, Automotive, Autonomous Vehicle, GENERAL MOTORS CO, hyperdrive, NATIONAL HIGHWAY TRAFFIC SAF, National Transportation Safety Board, Phoenix, technology, UBER TECHNOLOGIES INC

First known pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle
Incident may raise questions about safety of technology

Uber Technologies Inc. halted autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.

The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department.

After the incident, which happened at 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, she was transferred to a nearby hospital, where she died from her injuries. "Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation," Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened. https://t.co/cwTCVJjEuz

— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) March 19, 2018

Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We’re fully cooperating with @TempePolice and local authorities as they investigate this incident.

— Uber Comms (@Uber_Comms) March 19, 2018

Uber said on Monday that it was pausing tests of all its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident."

Companies including Alphabet Inc., General Motors Co., Uber and Baidu Inc. are investing billions of dollars to develop autonomous-vehicle technology because it has the potential to transform the auto industry, transportation in general and the way cities work. One analyst has estimated Alphabet’s Waymo unit is worth at least $70 billion. The fatality in Tempe could slow testing, delay commercialization and undermine such optimism.

Testing has expanded to complex urban areas as states like Arizona and Texas take a light-touch regulatory approach and companies race to be first to commercialize the technology. That’s helped improved the systems, but also increased the chance of a pedestrian death. Experts have long worried about the impact deadly crashes could have on the nascent industry.

"We’re within the phase of autonomous vehicles where we’re still learning how good they are. Whenever you release a new technology there’s a whole bunch of unanticipated situations," said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school. "Despite the fact that humans are also prone to error, we have as a society many decades of understanding of those errors."

The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the death and is sending a small team of investigators to Tempe, about 10 miles east of Phoenix. The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dispatched a special crash investigation team.

The NTSB opens relatively few highway accident probes each year, but has been closely following incidents involving autonomous or partially autonomous vehicles. Last year, it partially faulted Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot system for a fatal crash in Florida in 2016.

The NTSB’s cautionary tone on the emergence of self-driving technology contrasted with the Department of Transportation, which revised its policy on self-driving vehicles last year in an attempt to remove obstacles to the testing of such vehicles.

"As always we want the facts, but based on what is being reported this is exactly what we have been concerned about and what could happen if you test self-driving vehicles on city streets," said Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a Washington-based advocacy group. "It will set consumer confidence in the technology back years if not decades. We need to slow down."

The Phoenix area is a fertile ground for experiments in the technology. Uber has been testing there with safety drivers behind the wheel. Late last year, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, which has tested in the Phoenix area for years, began removing the safety drivers to transport a small number of residents. (Waymo staff sit in the back seat.) General Motors Co. is also testing in the Phoenix area. A GM spokesman declined to comment, and a representative from Waymo didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

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"Public safety is our top priority, and we are in communication with law enforcement, which is investigating the accident and gathering facts, as well as Uber," a spokesman for Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said.

Uber has had incidents in the past. Last year, Uber suspended its self-driving car program after one of its autonomous vehicles was involved in a high-impact crash in Tempe. The Uber vehicle was not responsible for the incident, and there were no injuries, the police said at the time.

"Tempe has been supportive of autonomous vehicle testing because of the innovation and promise the technology may offer," Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell said in a statement on Monday. "Testing must occur safely. All indications we have had in the past show that traffic laws are being obeyed by the companies testing here. Our city leadership and Tempe Police will pursue any and all answers to what happened in order to ensure safety moving forward."

January 19, 2018

Brilliant New Headlights Use a Million Pixels to Talk to the World

by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: auto industry, ces, CES2018, transportation

For the most part, digital technology is all about dumping things that move. Complex engines are giving way to simpler computer-controlled electric motors. Mirrorless cameras no longer have to flip mirrors out of the way to take photos, the way DSLR’s do. In the burgeoning lidar laser-sensor business, developers are embracing solid state systems that do away with all that spinning. CD players pulling music tracks from spinning discs? Adios.

So it’s perhaps surprising that one of the flashier automotive innovations that debuted at CES this week centers not just on moving parts but on millions of the things. In Las Vegas, Texas Instruments (which makes way more than those big calculators) unveiled a headlight system that adapts the company’s digital light processing technology to generate beams that can be precisely controlled via more than a million addressable pixels.

This system, so far deployed mostly in cinema and display projectors, works thanks to tiny moveable “micromirrors” that flip as many as 10,000 times a second, to either reflect light through a projection lens, generating a white pixel, or onto a black absorption surface in order to create a black pixel. It’s like turning each pixel on or off. The result is a new, smarter kind of headlight, one you can program to show the way without blinding oncoming drivers, or even project text, graphics, or animations onto the road ahead. (The company used CES to hawk the chipset that allows for this programming, known as DLP5531-Q1, to automakers and their lighting suppliers.)

Texas Instruments doesn’t have a monopoly on digitally programmable headlight technology—Audi unveiled a similar laser-based system last year—but it promises the highest resolution offering so far. Plus, its system works with any light source, so you don’t have to dump more common LED lights for the fancier laser tech.

The clearest immediate use case here is the opportunity to keep the high-beams shining even as other vehicles approach from the opposite direction. The system will track the oncoming car’s headlights via an onboard camera, and dim the bit of its own lights aiming that way, following the car as it gets closer. This tech could also work in conjunction with vehicle sensors to spotlight things that demand the driver’s attention, like roadside signs or animals about to dash into the road.

Eventually, these headlights could become essential for autonomous cars. “The chipset was developed to support adaptive driving beam headlight systems, but is capable of being programed to project information on the road,” says Brian Ballard, TI’s exterior lighting manager. A driverless car won’t have hands to tell that man waiting at the curb that it’s safe to cross the street. Headlights that can project a crosswalk, or even write out “Go for it!,” could fill the communication gap and encourage the public to accept these crash-preventing vehicles onto their streets.

TI says its (so far unnamed) automotive customers are already integrating the tech into their headlights, but don’t expect to see it on US roads anytime soon. These adaptive driving beam systems aren’t legal in the United States, because a very dusty rule demands cars have separate light sources for high and low beams—TI’s system combines them (same for Audi’s laser setup). As with most bureaucracy, the path to updating or killing that rule is arduous, requiring manufacturers prove this is essential safety technology for new cars.

So while we’re thrilled by the prospect of broadcasting the words “Get out of the left lane!” onto the road ahead for slow-moving cars to see (reversed so it’s legible in mirrors, of course), the best case will likely be the improved visibility that doesn’t have to be compromised just because someone else is on the road. We’ll take that too.