Ray Sullivan Author: Google self drive cars

Showing posts with label Google self drive cars. Show all posts

Tuesday, 22 July 2014

The internet of thingumybobs

Like many of you I've been hearing bits and pieces about IoT in recent months. The acronym takes me back to my airforce days, when it stood for Initial Officer Training, where newby RAF officers were given their first leadership training and taught which order to use their knives and forks in. It appears there are different types of cutlery for different types of food and there is definitely a right and wrong way to select your eating irons. As an other rank I never had that problem - I generally only needed the one knife, fork and spoon for any given sitting. I probably got them wrong on some occasions, to be fair.

But now it stands for the Internet of Things. This isn't a new concept, but perhaps it is one that is coming of age. I can recall reading in the early 'nineties an interview with Bill Gates where he enthused about washing machines and dishwashers being hooked up to the fledgling internet, receiving updates and diagnostics as needed. I recall wondering about the logistics of creating network points throughout the average British house, given than most I've ever lived in never had enough power points, let alone LAN sockets. I have a rule of thumb about electrical outlets when upgrading part of a circuit - work out how many sockets are likely to be needed in the worst case scenario, then double it. By all accounts, RAF Officers have the same approach with cutlery at mealtimes. I don't remodel often enough to ensure that I've always got enough sockets, so like most other people I have a surplus of extension cables dotted around the house waiting for the next partial rewire.

Obviously I hadn't considered the wireless environment we now live in, although I would still expect my WiFi to struggle if all my domestic appliances plus regular computing devices were to connect simultaneously. But that's a fixable engineering problem, I guess.

So are we going to see Bill Gates' vision realised? I think so, but expect there will be a mix of standards surfacing in an attempt to make one OS more predominant than the others. Personally I favour a Microsoft solution; like many folk who use opposing OS such as Android for recreational purposes, I revert to Windows when I want to write or do anything productive. I know Google wants to break this this up, but having been exposed to Chromebooks recently, I think I'll pass for the time being. Windows might be constantly hacked, bloated and prone to needing updates every time I look up, but they do have a track record in both consumer and business computing. Not a great record, maybe...

Of course it may be someone like Cisco who will hold the high ground - this IoT is all about devices talking to each other over the internet, allowing us to remove as much human interaction as required. You may not notice it happening - the process is very subtle and happening now. If you think about how you used the internet ten years ago it was probably just you and a computer. Now we routinely interact with computers via an intermediary device, setting our Sky boxes from our smart phone, for example. Google building self drive cars that will understand our travelling preferences is a heartbeat away.

The IoT is going to become very much in our faces and our lives very soon. But we may not even realise it while it unfolds. With luck it will develop into self selecting cutlery in case I find myself eating a meal in a posh hotel, because I never was sent on that course.

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Sunday, 17 February 2013

Driving Me Round the Bend

I've discussed self drive cars before - Google have been trialling a self-driving car for a couple of years and have recently applied for a driver's license for it from the State of Nevada. There's been a number of other attempts, too, and we're all aware of those cars that can parallel park themselves. Judging by the view from my office window, there aren't too many in circulation right now.

The attraction of designing a viable self drive vehicle is obvious - humans are pretty adaptable with technology and it will take a very advanced computer to improve on the anticipation skills we all see and utilise daily on our busy roads, but when they do then we may see a real decline in the carnage that unfortunately we still see on our roads from time to time. Because we are imperfect, we do make mistakes driving, we really can't anticipate every manoeuvre on the road and, of course, we get frustrated with delays and diversions.

So a computer that can operate a car as effectively as a human but is also capable of taking in information about the surroundings as well as about the route ahead should make our roads safer, especially if all cars are talking to a master network.

The mechanics of making a car's controls respond to inputs from a computer model seem to be pretty well cracked, as the parallel parking examples demonstrate. They also demonstrate a certain capability to monitor the external environment. But the aim for all the research is for the car to carry out complete trips unaided.

A British university, Oxford, has been testing their concept for a self drive car and like Google are hoping to get permission for it to be allowed on British roads. Their approach is quite different from Google's though. They are developing a car that learns, so it is useful for repetitive driving tasks such as the school run or the annual trip to the family holiday destination. When it doesn't know the route, it passes control back to the driver, otherwise it advises when it is content to take over the driving role.

The development team don't use GPS, the technology that is core to most self drive vehicles, but instead use a learning algorithm and external sensors. While I don't think this is the answer, there is good reason to shun GPS. Although GPS is very accurate in military hands - they can pinpoint a position to within a metre which is very handy when you are delivering a $1M Hellfire missile at an adversary, but the commercial version is a lot less accurate - deliberately so and liable to be turned off in the event of a major war. In the words of a recent BBC article on commercial GPS it is 'capable of accuracy to within 15 metres in a field, much less accurate in built up areas.' Come on, if you've ended up in a field, it isn't that accurate.

But a European research team has found a way to augment GPS using inertial sensors so that it is close to military accuracy, and it is believed that the next generation of commercial GPS units will incorporate this hybrid approach and make Sat Nav units more accurate. If the learning skills being developed by Oxford are merged with the hybrid GPS and whatever Google have been building then we may start to see the first really usable self-drive car.

After all, most of us don't want a car that does all the driving. Just the return trip from the pub.

If you want to read a novel where a Sat Nav goes rogue with devastating results then why not take a look at Digital Life Form

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Saturday, 5 January 2013

Self Drive Cars Getting Closer

Google have been playing around with self drive cars for some time. They drove one around San Francisco for twelve months with a professional driver and a software programmer on-board. The driver was there to intervene if the software got it wrong and was needed to prevent a crash. The programmer was there to, well I guess he was there to write emergency code in the event of a crash. Or to reboot if the OS failed. OK, I don't actually know what benefit the programmer contributed but at least he kept the professional driver company and could spot software glitches for fixing later.

Anyway, the driver only had to intervene once, and that was to badmouth an errant driver who ran up the backside of the Google-mobile. All in all the exercise was a success and in fact in May last year Google was awarded a drivers license for its self drive car by the State of Nevada.

This is one of the spin off benefits Google has been aiming for with its Google Earth, maps and street view software. The incredibly labour intensive generation of these programs which appear to have been donated for free to you and me has been for one reason only - to support high technology innovations such as self drive cars.

Why would we want cars to drive themselves, when driving is such fun? Well, driving can be fun, is fun some of the time, but it's also often tedious, demanding and, let's face it, dangerous. It doesn't matter how good a driver you are, or how carefully you drive for that matter, it only takes one inexperienced, drunk, tired or distracted driver in another vehicle to write you off. And to be honest, most of us aren't really good drivers, or careful ones, all of the time. We all have bad days, tired days, distracted periods and even if we don't drive back from the pub some of us will drive to work or the shops the morning after a session and probably aren't strictly sober at the time.

We're normal, I guess.

But one or a handful of self drive cars on the road won't make the roads a particularly safer place for you and me. Sure, if we're in the cockpit of such a car it seems likely that it can avoid most of the problems we see on the roads today, but it will need a majority of cars to be driven by computers to make the process really beneficial. On their own the self drive cars will be reactive and defensive in nature, using sensors to detect the positions, velocities and vectors of all surrounding vehicles. It will be able to access the latest information about the road, the weather, the traffic jams and, assuming it knows where it's going, it can constantly monitor the determined route to optimise it to compensate for traffic jams and road works.

Get all of the cars on the road fitted out with the technology, though, and you've got an organism that can feed off each other. They can share their individual destinations and route plans and can determine the optimum plan for all the vehicles on the road. If there are a minimum of vehicles being driven manually then the defensive methodologies being developed today will kick in and accommodate them.

Perhaps the thorniest problem will be around whether you can allow non-drivers to use self drive cars without a license holder, or even if one can be used to pick up a group of tanked up passengers from the pub at chucking out time?

Is all of this science fiction? Well, clearly not in Nevada, they've probably considered the subject of responsibility already. Whether their determinations will be readily accepted across the board, in other States of the US as well in countries such as the UK, remains to be seen. But at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in that State next week there are going to be announcements about self drive cars. Specifically the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota is showcasing a prototype Lexus that is fitted with advanced technology that monitors whether the driver is awake and can keep the car on the road and stop safely at traffic lights using sensors that take into account other vehicles and even pedestrians.

Perhaps Nevada is going to be issuing another drivers license to a machine next week.

Related stories:

Apple to buy Tom-Tom

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Saturday, 15 December 2012

Apple to Buy Tom Tom

You would think with all their resources Apple would be able to build a mapping app for their iOS. But after being slated within hours of the initial release in September up to the recent scathing remarks from the Australian police a few days ago they are still struggling to sort it out. Sacking senior managers didn't work, either.

It turns out that the mapping module they've been using belongs to Tom Tom, the European mapping software and hardware company. Tom Tom have a good reputation, over here in the UK at least, although they do get blamed for sending articulated wagons down farm tracks every now and then. I have a personal theory that the next innovation in GPS mapping needs to be a common sense detector, one that shuts the device down when it detects that the driver is incapable of thinking for him or herself.

Anyway, it seems that Tom Tom would like some cash - about 100 million Euros, give or take - and Apple have a fortune lodged outside of the US that would be taxed to within a cent of its life if brought back into the mother country, so buying out a European company is a great way of using that surplus.

Oh, and Apple need a functioning mapping app that works. It sounds like they've decided that their own attempts at using the Tom Tom mapping data is not going to happen. I find it surprising and have assumed that Apple were about to do a 'ta-da' gesture with a re-released and correctly functioning version of their mapping app, but there you go.

They've been wooing Tom Tom and have been flashing the cash, according to industry rumours. It appears that a purchase announcement is imminent, so if you're a Tom Tom shareholder then it looks like Christmas has come early.

There's another dimension to this story, though. We know the market leader in mapping apps for mobile devices is Google, who have also spent a lot of time melding their app to a self drive module, creating a car that drives itself. Cars that drive themselves could be the next big thing - if done intelligently you could imagine a world where all the cars in a city take their passengers efficiently to their destinations, exchanging travel data to a central cloud. That way traffic jams can be avoided, fuel can be saved and frustration can be reduced. Apple will have seen what Google is doing and will want to elbow in that market. Getting a major slice of the automobile industry has got to be a fantastic growth sector. A marriage between Apple and Tom Tom, arguably the predominant GPS navigation device in the market, will be a major step towards catching up on Google.

And of course Tom Tom wouldn't be able to achieve all of the research and development without Apple's cash. Or its Cloud knowledge.

I don't know if all this speculation is likely to be close, but it is reasonable. If it is, then Apple is embarking on an incredible journey, and having Tom Tom aboard is a shrewd companion. At least they will know when they've reached their destination.