Upcoming UK Regulations for Autonomous Vehicles

Stagecoach and Starship Technologies today lobbied the UK Parliament’s Transport Committee to introduce regulations to make autonomous vehicles safer. Stagecoach is working on autonomous buses, and Starship is introducing autonomous delivery robots. Warwick University’s Manufacturing Group, a leading university in engineering and manufacturing design, joined the companies. The companies advocate that safety measures will help …

Incorporating Ethics in Autonomous Design Systems (ADS)

Stanford Professors Tom Byers led a lively discussion of how to design ethical principles for autonomous vehicles with Stanford’s Chris Gerdes and Ford Motor’s Tony D’amato. Gerdes and D’amato believe that developing these rules relies on being able to translate legal and ethical principles into engineering requirements, with no need for endless philosophical discussions about …

Cornell’s Self-Driving Cars Have Memory

Cornell researchers built an artificial neural network for self-driving cars to make the cars remember routes and signs; each vehicle that uses this network can identify what constitutes traffic participants and what is safe to ignore. After several tests runs on the road, these vehicles can reliably detect and identify objects, even if they are traveling …

Tesla Pays Penalty for Violating the Clean Air Act

This week Tesla admitted that it violated the federal Clean Air Act while mixing the car coating chemicals and managing the storage tanks in its Fremont, CA facility. The EPA announced that Tesla will pay $ 275,000 in penalties. To avoid future penalties, Tesla will follow EPA standards that minimize hazardous pollutants leaking from its …

First Steps for Driverless Vehicles

For at least the last two decades people (almost always male) have been tinkering with a wide variety of designs of self-driving cars that they have been dreaming of starting at least two decades earlier. Tinkering continues to be a very challenging pursuit. Finally, in early 2020 there was a modest step forward, in the form of an autonomous …

Self-Driving Cars Need More Development

There have been enough crashes, including ones that killed people (sometimes the drivers and passengers), that there needs to be improvements in the technology. For example, a woman driving a Tesla on May 11, 2018, was using its “Autopilot” feature crashed into the back of a fire truck in Utah. Unfortunately, autonomous vehicles won’t make …

Self-Driving Cars Need to Drive in All Environments

We have a weekly meeting in Mountain View, CA and every week we see at least one Waymo car (with one or two people inside) driving along the streets. (Since the company’s headquarters are in Mountain View, this is not surprising.)  But Mountain View’s streets are easy to navigate compared with the myriad driving environments …