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Uber's self-driving vehicles are picking up folks in Arizona
Uber's fleet of self-driving vehicles are now cruising the streets of Tempe, Arizona. After a spat with the California Department of Motor Vehicles in December, Uber moved its line of 16 custom, autonomous Volvo XC90 SUVs to Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey welcomed the company with open arms (and no extra restrictions on self-driving vehicles).
Passenger drones will begin flying over Dubai this summer
The single-rider, human-sized quadcopter that whipped CES 2016 into a frenzy could be carrying passengers as early as this summer. As the head of Dubai's Roads and Transportation Agency announced at the World Government summit today, the Chinese EHang 184 passenger drone will begin "regular operations" around the futuristic city in July of 2017.
Google's self-driving cars are getting better at autonomy
Perhaps more than any company (with the possible exception of Tesla), Google's autonomous driving record has been under close scrutiny. Today the company bears news that while dramatically increasing the number of miles tested, the number of times a human had to grab the wheel because something went wrong -- "disengagement" -- actually decreased. As Waymo's blog post (and California-DMV-mandated report (PDF)) tells it, these disengagements fell from 0.8 per thousand miles to 0.2 from 2015 to 2016.
Autonomous Ubers return to California with humans in control
Uber's run-in with the California DMV has apparently been smoothed over for now. Although the ride-hailing giant has since shipped its real-world autonomous vehicle testing out of the state, several of the offending vehicles are once again street legal in California -- provided Uber keeps the self-driving systems turned off and a human driver behind the wheel.
DOT establishes 10 autonomous vehicle proving grounds
So far, testing autonomous vehicles on city streets has had mixed results. Uber's plan did not go over well in the company's hometown of San Francisco, but cities like Phoenix and Boston have been a little more receptive to the idea. Now, to solve some of those bureaucratic headaches and foster a little more collaboration at the same time, the US Department of Transportation has laid out 10 autonomous vehicle proving grounds where research teams, automakers and startups can try out their technology before it hits the streets.
Investigation clears Tesla for fatal Autopilot crash
Last May a Tesla Model S ran into a tractor trailer in Florida while in Autopilot mode. The collision resulted in the death of the driver Joshua Brown and prompted an investigation by the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Today that government agency concluded its investigation and found no defects with the vehicle's Autopilot or Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) features.
BMW shows off what else you could be doing in a self-driving car
The world is overflowing with autonomous cars. That's great because the competition will ultimately benefit everyone. The typical self-driving demo (while generally impressive), usually requires reporters to sit in the passenger seat with a safety engineer behind the wheel. BMW, on the other hand, put me behind the wheel and let its prototype 5 Series tell me all about Las Vegas while barreling down the freeway.
Bose is building ride-smoothing tech for autonomous cars
Bose dabbles in a lot of different things, but the most left-field product could be its ride-smoothing trucker seats. The company is about to demo similar tech for autonomous cars at its "Beyond Sound" CES experience in Las Vegas. Specifically, it'll show off a (simulated) autonomous vehicle equipped with Bose Ride suspension seating that "isolates passengers from road vibrations, shaking and unwanted motion," the company said in a press release.
NVIDIA made a self-driving car with its Xavier supercomputer
At NVIDIA's CES 2017 keynote address, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced his company's plan to turn your car into "your most personal robot." Specifically, NVIDIA announced the company's AI car supercomputer, the Xavier -- an auto-grade, 512-core Volta GPU and AI platform that's capable of learning how to drive by watching a human driver. To show it off for the CES crowd, Nvidia installed the system in an autonomous Lincoln called BB8 and let it loose on the streets of Silicon Valley.
Inside Mercedes' Silicon Valley research center
A metal typewriter sits on a pedestal churning out the next sentence of a collaborative story. For every line I typed onto paper, the AI computer controlling the hunk of metal replies with what it thinks would be a good follow-up. The goal of the experiment is to see what happens when you feed an artificial intelligence only fairy tales. It's the kind of seemingly idiosyncratic thing you'd expect from IBM, Google or Apple. But I actually found it inside Mercedes-Benz's R&D North American headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Boston is the latest city to allow self-driving car tests
You can add Boston to the list of places where autonomous vehicles are being tested legally. Rather than trials on the city's, ahem, interesting street layout, company NuTonomy will start small, beginning at the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park on January 3rd, according to The Boston Herald.
Ford's new self-driving Fusion almost looks like a regular car
Ford has shown the first images of its new self-driving Fusion Hybrid with a more powerful computer and improved, better-integrated sensors. It uses an upgraded version of the Fusion Hybrid platform, bolstered by self-driving hardware, a large new computer and electrical controls that "are close to production-ready," the company said in a press release. It also packs lower-profile LIDAR units that appear to be the "Puck" models from Velodyne, a company in which it recently invested $150 million.
Tesla's Autopilot will now stick to the speed limit
Autopilot-enabled Teslas are about to become slightly more conservative drivers. The company's latest software update will match the top speed to the posted speed limit when the vehicle's Autosteer function is engaged, TechCrunch reports today. In the previous version, Autopilot was allowed to speed by about five mph on undivided highways, but the new cap won't apply on freeways where the system is limited to 90 mph.
Uber admits its self-driving cars have trouble with bike lanes
After reports of Uber's self-driving cars running red lights and failing to stop for pedestrians during trips in San Francisco, the company has also admitted to issues with its autonomous vehicles navigating around (and legally interacting with) bike lanes. A spokesperson told The Guardian that the company was working to fix a flaw that allowed cars to turn into cycling lanes. Instead of merging into lanes ahead of making a right-hand turn, SF Bicycle Coalition executive director Brian Weidenmeier said he saw Uber's self-driving cars make unsafe turns through bike lanes, twice.
Michigan embraces our self-driving future
Michigan isn't just America's high five, historically it's the heart of the auto industry as well. And now the state looks to be preparing for the future. Today, Governor Rick Snyder has signed four bills into law regarding autonomous vehicle repair, research, driving networks and accident responsibility.
Nexar's dashcam app is free, but at the cost of your data
We likely aren't going to get flying cars anytime soon, but we will have self-driving ones. They'll be packed to the gills with sensors to keep us safe and sound as we Snapchat ourselves cruising down the highway, bellowing along to our favorite Urfaust tracks. But those are a ways off, and the phone in your pocket already has a pretty solid set of sensors in it. Plus, using a device you already own is far more economical than buying a new car. That's where Nexar's dashcam app comes in. A $7 mount holds a phone, while the free app uses your gizmo's onboard accelerometer, cameras and microphone do the rest of the work.
Google's self-driving cars master tricky three-point turns
With supercomputers for brains and perfect 360-degree vision, one would imagine it would be fairly simple for an autonomous vehicle to pass the time-honored driver's ed test of performing a three-point turn. But according to Google's self-driving car project October report, that is one of the many things that's easier said than done for a robot vehicle.
Apple chose BlackBerry's 'hood for its car OS project
Apple may have put the brakes on plans to build its own self-driving car, but the company's plug-and-play, self-driving operating system is still moving forward, even if the team has been scaled back. According to a new report from Bloomberg, what's left of Project Titan is coming together at Apple's Canadian office in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, using a big team of engineers poached from BlackBerry's automotive software division QNX.
Automakers and Google balk at California's self-driving rules
Google and a cadre of automakers are not happy about the state of California's proposed rules for autonomous vehicles, which they say would severely slow their progress towards a self-driving future. Although the state legislature approved autonomous trials last month, the group objected to the state's decision to require certain regulations that the federal government made voluntary it its own policy.
Singapore's self-driving taxi service has its first accident
That didn't take long: One of Singapore's nuTonomy self-driving taxis has already been in an at-fault collision. Less than a month after the service launched, a slow-moving taxi hit a lorry (translation: a truck) while changing lanes, according to a Facebook post from Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA). Thankfully no one was injured in the accident, but that isn't stopping the LTA and local police from investigating the matter anyway.
