In April 2023, NYC Mayor Adams unveiled new 400-lb robo-cops, intended to revamp NYPD’s police force. San Francisco and other cities are following suit. The race to introduce robocops could be because real cops have had several issues dealing with self-driving cars. For example, in April 2022, SFO police had to pull over GM’s self-driving …
Category Archives: Self-Driving Vehicles
AI-Image Processing Helps Autonomous Cars
Autonomous cars will benefit from high dynamic range (HDR) cameras because these cameras use AI-based chips that process data better in low and high-field vision. This image from Silicon Valley’s Ambarella AI chip maker shows how HDR chips help autonomous cars better detect objects at tunnel entrances and exits. The Norwegian company Zivid is one …
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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 …
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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 …
Finland’s Driverless Sensible 4 Survives Extreme Temperatures
Finland’s Sensible 4 passed testing in extreme weather conditions. Freezing rain can affect the hardware, and their recent test in June 2022 proved that the cars, and self-driving software, and underlying hardware were not affected by the freezing conditions or the rain. Sensible 4 can also remember which part of the street to park on …
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Intel Announces 2022 IPO for its Self-Driving Car, Mobileye
On March 7, 2022, Intel’s Mobileye announced that it started preparing for an initial public offering of its self-driving car, Mobileye. Intel did not disclose the price range o number of shares in the IPO, which is under review by the SEC. Mobileye is sold today at several dealers across the country, including a few …
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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 …
Are Self-Driving Cars Safe?
Self-driving, or climate cars, are the future. Today, 66% of people believe that autonomous cars are smarter and safer than most drivers.
GM, Electric Vehicles & Flying Cadillac
General Motors surprised everyone at CES 2021 with their Flying Cadillac which looks like a cross between a drone and a helicopter. The Flying Cadillac has a 90-kW electric motor to power four rotors for vertical takeoff and landing. It is slower than an airplane, with a maximum speed of up to 56 mph. General Motors is …