Posts

News Roundup: Waymo Gets Patent For Exterior Airbags On Self-Driving Cars, Ford to Test ‘Cellular-V2X’ Tech in San Diego and More

/in , , , , , , , ,

Jennifer van der Kleut

 

Waymo granted patent for exterior airbags

Google’s self-driving car spinoff company, Waymo, has been granted a patent for an airbag system that would be located on the outside of a car. Since self-driving cars are outfitted with sensors, cameras, radar and lidar on the outside of the car, Waymo engineers argue that the car itself can predict an accident even sooner than a human driver can (or can’t, if he or she is distracted). The concept of exterior airbags could protect passengers in the vehicle from an impact, as well as “reduce the likelihood of severe injuries or damage to objects such as pedestrians, bicyclists, animals, other vehicles, or simply inanimate objects.” Read more from Silicon Beat.

 

Mcity autonomous vehicle testing ground gets big investment from automakers, corporations

Mcity, the University of Michigan’s testing ground for autonomous vehicles, has received a total of $11 million in funding from 11 different companies, both corporations and automakers. Ford, General Motors, Toyota and Honda all contributed about $1 million each, and other corporations like State Farm Insurance, Verizon, LG and others. Mcity is a 32-acre man-made “city” where companies can conduct research and test autonomous vehicles. The hub offers a number of varied conditions for vehicles to test in, such as different road conditions, four-lane highways, high-pedestrian streets featuring fake, mechanical pedestrians, and much more. Read more from HybridCars.com.

 

Ford partnering with AT&T, Qualcomm and Nokia to test ‘cellular-V2X’ technology

Ford Motor Co. announced this week that it has formed a partnership with Qualcomm, AT&T and Nokia to test cellular modems that can connect vehicles to each other and to roadside infrastructure to help better navigate in bad weather or construction zones. “Cellular-V2X” technology, as it is called, aims to connect vehicles with traffic lights, roadside beacons and other vehicles on the road to share real-time information about driving conditions. It’s meant to improve safety, as well as help speed up the deployment of self-driving vehicles. Testing is scheduled to take place in San Diego, California before the end of the year. For testing, Ford vehicles will be outfitted with Qualcomm hardware powered by AT&T’s 4G LTE cellular network and Nokia’s computing technology. Read more from Automotive News.

Image: Rendering of self-driving minivan with exterior airbags by Waymo

D20 Stock Index Closes Out 2016 With a Slight Dip

/in , , , , ,

The Driverless Transportation Weekly Stock Index (D20) retreated from an all-time high and three consecutive weeks of gains by dropping 2.41 points, or 1.4 percent, to close the week (and the year) at 174.04.

Fourteen price losers and only six price gainers ensured that the D20 followed the Dow, which slumped 0.9 percent, and the S&P 500, which fell 1.1 percent.

Mobileye (MBLY) had a great week, closing the year by announcing that it had partnered with HERE to provided crowd-sourced High Definition (HD) mapping.  Its stock rose 9.73 percent to close at $38.12.  Audi, Mercedes and BMW purchased HERE, a detailed mapping data provider, from Nokia in early 2016.

Visit the Driverless Transportation D20 Stock Index page to learn more about it and its component stocks.

Up-and-Comers:

Automile, a Palo Alto-based startup, has secured $7.5 million in Series A funding to build out and expand its fleet logistics and management business.  It is a telematics play allowing fleet managers to easily install a device under the dash to report back mileage logs, trip statistics, real-time location tracking and accident alerts, as well as plan predictive maintenance.

D20 constituent company, Magna (MGA) has teamed up with LiDAR-maker Innoviz to complete its suite of sensing technologies for driverless vehicle systems.  Innoviz is developing a solid-state LiDAR system that has a target cost of $100 per unit and a small physical footprint.  Magna is a key Tier 1 supplier to almost every major automaker.

News Roundup: Atlanta Builds a Smart Corridor, Hitachi Develops App to Park Cars Via Remote Control, and More

/in , , , ,

A roundup of some of the biggest headlines to come out of the driverless and connected-car industries over the past week:

 

Hitachi and Clarion Co. develop app to park your car via remote smartphone app

Hitachi has partnered up with Clarion Co. to develop a smartphone app that allows you to park your car by remote control from outside the car. It works for parallel or perpendicular parking, or parking in a garage. The companies announced this week that they plan to offer the system to vehicle manufacturers initially, to attain early commercialization. Read more from JapanToday.

 

Atlanta’s North Avenue to become smart corridor, and potentially driverless corridor

A project is underway along Atlanta’s North Avenue to transform it into a smart corridor, complete with smart signals and lighting. Even the pavement will have markings and sensors that can talk to each other and talk with the traffic signals to make vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian traffic move more safely and efficiently. A representative of the City of Atlanta says, once the smart corridor is complete, the city has also received more than a dozen proposals to host a self-driving car demonstration there as well, which could potentially lead to the avenue becoming a driverless car corridor as well. North Avenue is a highly congested corridor, anchored on once side by Georgia Tech and on the other end by Ponce City Market. Read more from Curbed: Atlanta and AJC.com.

 

Chinese company buys stake in Nokia’s Here mapping system

The Chinese technology group Tencent has bought a stake in Nokia’s mapping system arm, Here. Industry analysts speculate that Tencent wants to win market share away from its two biggest competitors in the burgeoning driverless car market, Baidu and Alibaba. Here will compete with Amap, the in-car mapping system Baidu and Alibaba recently purchased from AutoNavi two years ago. Market figures indicate Baidu and Alibaba’s mapping systems each get around 200 million users per month. Tencent’s current mapping system only gets around 8 million users per month. Chinese laws only allow a certain number of licensed providers to create maps of the country due to national security concerns. Read more from Financial Times.

 

Ford Invests in Civil Maps, 3-D Mapping Startup Focusing on Fully Autonomous Cars

/in , , , , , ,

Jennifer van der Kleut

Ford Motor Company has joined a $6.6-million funding round for a startup company working on 3-D mapping.

The company, Civil Maps, “uses spatial data to create ‘extremely accurate localization,’ explains ZDNet. Civil Maps “claims its technology is better suited to autonomous vehicles and mobile networks than existing mapping technologies.”

Civil Maps is focusing solely on fully autonomous cars, rather than on semi-autonomous systems like Tesla Motors’.

Capable mapping is a key component to the success and efficiency of fully self-driving cars. As Fortune Magazine explains, it’s not only a matter of being able to see the world around the car, but also being able to fully comprehend what is around the car, and whether it is important. In other words, being able to discern a pedestrian from a street sign, or a leaf on the road versus a big piece of wood (which is what caused the latest in a string of crashes with Tesla’s Autopilot system).

“Civil Maps boasts it has developed technology to address one of the stickier mapping issues with self-driving cars: converting the massive amounts of data coming in from the car’s sensors into valuable and readable maps,” Fortune explains.

“Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map,” Sravan Puttagunta, CEO of Civil Maps, told ZDNet. “Civil Maps’ scalable map generation process enables fully autonomous vehicles to drive like humans do - identifying on-road and off-road features even when they might be missing, deteriorated or hidden from view, and letting a car know what it can expect along its route.”

Ford, which has long been working on developing and testing its own brand of self-driving cars, recently joined a round of funding for Civil Maps led by Motus Ventures, which was also joined by Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford, and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

Ford also joined Google, Uber, Lyft, and Volvo earlier this year to create the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets group, which aims to promote the concept of self-driving cars and influence legislation, ZDNet reported.

Civil Maps’ existing investors include Chinese auto-maker SAIC Motor Co and Stanford-StartX Fund.

Investing in and acquiring 3-D mapping technology is becoming a strong focus for companies working on driverless technology. Last summer, German automakers such as Audi, BMW and Daimler announced they were teaming up to pay more than $2.7 billion for Nokia’s Here.

Image courtesy of Civil Maps.

BMW, Intel and Mobileye Promise Autonomous Car Ridesharing Company Launch in 5 Years

/1 Comment/in , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jennifer van der Kleut

In somewhat of a surprise move, BMW has announced it has developed a self-driving car that will be ready to hit the market in five years.

Why is it a surprise? Because BMW has never mentioned working on the technology-while, meanwhile, everyone from Google to Tesla, Ford, General Motors and others have been making their own autonomous-car announcements one after the other over the past year or two.

As WIRED reported, BMW made the announcement Friday that it will be deploying these fully-autonomous cars for ridesharing purposes.

The cars will rely on technology from chip-making giant Intel and the popular Israeli firm Mobileye. As we reported, Mobileye recently teamed up with Colmobil Corp., and has already put the first autonomous car up for sale in Israel.

Mobileye’s comprehensive, high-tech mapping technology is making the firm a highly sought-after partner for autonomous car development.

“Mapping is the key to making these cars work. A self-driving car with detailed maps can dedicate far more computing power to identifying and addressing things like cyclists, pedestrians and other cars in real-time,” WIRED stated. “That’s why TomTom still exists, and why BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen chipped in to buy [Nokia’s] mapping company Here last year.”

As Bloomberg points out, this announcement makes BMW AG the first automaker to set a specific date to promise delivery of autonomous cars to market.

Ridesharing businesses have been identified as big potential money-makers for autonomous vehicles. Already, several automakers including Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, Ford and Chinese company Didi Chuxing have announced plans to launch ridesharing/robot taxi companies, some of which are already operating in select markets.

Robo-taxis will make up 40 percent of automotive profits by 2030, making them a bigger revenue-generator than selling vehicles to individuals, according to consulting company Roland Berger, reports Bloomberg. In particular, they could prove to be very helpful to the elderly and the disabled.

Testing Driverless Cars in Snowy Winter Weather - Check!

/in , , ,

Jennifer van der Kleut

It’s an announcement industry followers have been waiting for.

Finally, a company that is heavily invested in autonomous and connected-car technology is putting it to the test in extreme weather.

Ford Motor Co., together with the University of Michigan, announced this week that the partners have been testing the technology in snowy, icy winter weather over the past month, and will continue.

As Forbes points out, one of the factors that makes Michigan an ideal location for testing autonomous cars is the widely varying weather from season to season-that and, of course, the fact that the University has Mcity, its 32-acre testing ground with a fake cityscape, built specifically for testing autonomous and connected-car technology.

One burning question that industry professionals have long been asking is how well autonomous car technology would fare in extreme weather when rain, snow or ice might obstruct cameras and sensors. As WIRED puts it, “Radar and LIDAR do most of the work looking for other cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles, while cameras typically read street signs and lane markers.”

If those systems are obstructed, one could find himself in a dangerous situation. This is why many are eager to hear how Ford’s tests are going.

Jim McBride, Ford’s head of autonomous research, told WIRED that Ford creates a high-fidelity, 3D map of the area its test car is going to travel before a test drive. This form of “self-locating” helps its cars compensate in inclement weather conditions.

According to McBride, “Those maps include details like the exact position of the curbs and lane lines, trees and signs, along with local speed limits and other relevant rules. The more a car knows about an area, the more it can focus its sensors and computing power on detecting temporary obstacles—like people and other vehicles—in real time.”

News like this sheds light on why high-profile deals and partnerships with mapping and navigation companies like TomTom and Nokia’s HERE are such big business right now, and why industry analysts think Google’s acquisition of traffic tracking app Waze a few years ago will prove to be a big boon in the driverless race.

All in all, McBride told WIRED he is very confident Ford’s tests in snow and ice will go well.

“We’re able to drive perfectly well in snow,” he said.