self-drivingcar
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Yandex's autonomous cars have driven over six million miles in 'challenging conditions'
Yandex's self-driving cars have now driven over 10 million kilometres, mostly on Moscow's icy roads.
Bosch is finally making LiDAR sensors for autonomous cars
Bosch says it's developed production-ready LiDAR sensors for use in vehicles. It's hoping to keep costs down by making them at scale. That way, it might be able to offer them at a lower price and bolster more widespread adoption of autonomous driving systems.
Ford is bringing its self-driving cars to Austin, Texas
Ford has announced it will bring its self-driving cars to Austin. The Texas state capital joins Miami and Washington, DC as initial launch markets for the company's autonomous vehicle service. It's also testing the cars in Detroit, Palo Alto and Pittsburgh.
Self-driving vehicle startup Drive.ai may be looking for a buyer
Self-driving car companies are quickly coming to grips with some hard financial realities. Sources talking to The Information claim Drive.ai, one of the few companies operating autonomous shuttles, is looking for buyers. It's reportedly shopping itself around to "bigger rivals" and hired an investment bank as an advisor. There's nothing definite, and Drive.ai might opt to raise money if there's no sale, but it's notable that the company might be on the market less than a year after it deployed its first self-driving vans.
Toyota experiment uses cameras to create city maps for self-driving cars
Self-driving cars usually benefit from having detailed road maps, but creating those maps can be agonizingly slow when it requires cars loaded with exotic hardware. Toyota researchers and Carmera might have an easier solution: use off-the-shelf cameras to get the job done. They're planning a "proof of concept" project where they'll use both Toyota Safety Sense-based cameras and run-of-the-mill dashcams to generate map data in downtown Tokyo. The months-long experiment will mix visual and existing digital map data to spot road markings, curbs and other details an autonomous vehicle would need to recognize while plotting its route.
Apple details layoffs of 190 workers in its self-driving car division
After early confirmation, Apple is officially laying off workers in its self-driving car team. The company sent a letter to the California Employment Development Department warning that it would let go of 190 Project Titan members employees in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. The move will take place April 16th and will mostly affect engineers, with 124 losing their positions.
VW may pour $1.7 billion into Ford's self-driving car venture
VW and Ford may be serious about partnering on self-driving cars. Wall Street Journal sources claim VW has tentatively agreed to invest a total of $1.7 billion in Ford's autonomy-focused Argo subsidiary and turn it into an "equally held joint venture." While the exact plans for the partnership weren't mentioned, VW could bring a number of its related efforts to the table, including its Moia mobility service brand as well as Audi's Autonomous Intelligent Driving group.
Waymo's self-driving cars needed a lot less human intervention in 2018
Waymo likes to boast that its self-driving cars can handle tough situations, and now it has some extra data to back up its claims. The California DMV has published manufacturers' reports for autonomous vehicle disengagements (moments when a human had to intervene), and Waymo's disengagement rate fell in 2018 to 0.09 for every 1,000 driverless miles -- that's half as many instances as in 2017. To Waymo, that's evidence the cars are better at dealing with "edge cases," those once-in-a-lifetime situations that used to require human adaptability.
Amazon invests in a self-driving car startup
Amazon is clearly interested in autonomy between its delivery drone project and Scout robots, but it's taking that commitment one step further. The tech giant has participated in a $530 million investment round for Aurora Innovation, a self-driving car startup created by luminaries like ex-Googler Chris Urmson, former Tesla Autopilot leader Sterling Anderson and Uber autonomy co-founder Drew Bagnell. While Amazon hasn't said what it hopes to gain from the investment, Aurora's technology may provide some clues.
Waymo may team up with Renault-Nissan on self-driving taxis
Waymo might not be done courting the automotive world after working with the likes of Fiat Chrysler and Jaguar Land Rover. Nikkei claims the Alphabet-owned company is in the "final phase" of talks to partner with the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance on self-driving car services. While there aren't too many specifics, one project would have Waymo and Nissan work together on autonomous taxis, including a system for booking rides. You'd hear about the union in the spring, Nikkei said.
Second Apple employee accused of stealing self-driving car tech
Apple is grappling with another employee accused of stealing autonomous vehicle trade secrets. NBC News has learned that the FBI arrested Jizhong Chen for allegedly trying to swipe self-driving car tech and pass it along to a Chinese competitor. After an employee saw him taking photos in a sensitive work area, the company conducted an investigation that discovered thousands of sensitive documents on his personal computer, including roughly a hundred photos from inside an Apple building. They also found that he'd recently applied to work at that competitor.
Microsoft and MIT can detect AI 'blind spots' in self-driving cars
Self-driving cars are still prone to making mistakes, in part because the AI training can only account for so many situations. Microsoft and MIT might just fill in those gaps in knowledge -- they've developed a model that can catch these virtual "blind spots," as MIT describes them. The approach has the AI compare a human's actions in a given situation to what it would have done, and alters its behavior based on how closely it matches the response. If an autonomous car doesn't know how to pull over when an ambulance is racing down the road, it could learn by watching a flesh-and-bone driver moving to the side of the road.
Apple lays off 200 employees working on self-driving cars
Apple's secretive self-driving car division, codenamed Project Titan, has undergone a major restructuring process under new leadership. Unfortunately, that entails dismissing over 200 employees this week, according to CNBC. An Apple spokesperson has confirmed the layoffs to the publication and also revealed that some employees previously under Titan have been transferred to other divisions.
Jaguar tests self-driving cars that project their next move
Car makers have explored a number of ways to have self-driving vehicles signal where they're going, but they tend to rely on blinking lights or other codes that might not be easy to interpret in a hurry. Jaguar Land Rover might have something more intuitive: it has developed a system that projects an autonomous vehicle's direction of travel on the road ahead. The system casts a series of bars on the road to indicate when it's turning, setting off or stopping. The gap between the bars can expand or shrink to indicate changes in speed. You'll know if it's safe to cross the road without having to carefully watch a car's actions.
Stop & Shop is bringing autonomous food stands to Boston
Forget self-driving grocery delivery cars -- Stop & Shop wants robotic vehicles to bring a chunk of the store to your door. It's launching autonomous grocery vehicles in the greater Boston area that will let you shop for produce, meal kits and "convenience items" (think bread and eggs) just outside your home. You just have to hail one of the Robomart-made cars through a mobile app, unlock the vehicle when it arrives, and pick your food -- a combination of computer vision and RFID tagging automatically flags your purchases. It's not quite Amazon Go on wheels, but it's close.
Walmart will offer autonomous grocery deliveries in Arizona
Walmart is expanding its experiments with self-driving grocery deliveries courtesy of a new trial in Surprise, Arizona. In the wake of its partnership with Ford, the retailer's latest pilot will use startup Udelv's autonomous cargo vans "custom-made" for food drop-offs.
Microsoft will help train LG's self-driving car software
While LG's CES presence has mainly been about TVs -- of the rollable and 8K variety -- and robots, it hasn't forgotten about the tech show's other obsession: cars. With a self-driving data collection partnership with Here maps already under its belt, not to mention its plans to import WebOS from its TVs into car dashboards, LG's latest team-up sounds like its biggest yet. The Korean company is tapping Microsoft's cash cow cloud service Azure and AI tech to grow its own autonomous driving and infotainment systems.
Baidu's self-driving car platform can handle parking and speed bumps
Baidu is starting 2019 with a big boost to its autonomous vehicle ambitions. It's launching Apollo 3.5, an updated self-driving platform it claims is the first open source system that can handle "complex" driving in both the city and suburbia. It's now better-suited to the challenges of the road, including parking, narrow lanes and speed bumps. You won't have to wait too long to see it in action -- Udelv is is planning to roll out as many as 100 test vehicles across the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the US.
Toyota's latest self-driving test car is smarter than ever
We got a look at Toyota's first self-driving research vehicle way back during CES 2013, and now the company will introduce the updated P4 platform at CES 2019. It upgrades on the second and third generation cars with the introduction of Lexus' latest flagship sedan, the LS 500h, but it doesn't stop there. The computer managing its technology has not only become more powerful than ever before, but it's also smaller so it tucks directly against the rear seat, and it only requires power from the hybrid battery, using a 12v battery of its own just as an emergency backup.
DoorDash will make autonomous food deliveries with help from GM
DoorDash has made it pretty clear that if you're hungry, it's going to be the company that makes sure you get what you want. Over the last year or so it's rolled out group ordering, grocery delivery and even ice cream delivery -- all with sustainability on the agenda. Now, it's making sure you get fed as soon as is absolutely possible, thanks to a partnership with General Motors' Cruise self-driving vehicles.
