Computers Powering Self-Driving Cars Could Drive Global Carbon Emissions

Would Quantum balance this? 

Computers Powering Self-Driving Cars Could Drive Global Carbon Emissions

MIT News, Adam Zewe, January 13, 2023

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers determined the computers powering self-driving vehicles could produce as many greenhouse gas emissions as all currently operating datacenters worldwide. The International Energy Agency estimates those datacenters presently generate about 0.3% of global carbon emissions. The MIT researchers' statistical model calculated that the emissions of 1 billion autonomous vehicles could equal datacenters’ global emissions volume if each vehicle equipped with a computer consuming 840 watts drove just one hour daily. More than 90% of simulations showed each vehicle's computer would require more efficient hardware.to prevent autonomous vehicles’ aggregated emissions from exceeding those of datacenters. ... ' 

Deere Invests Billions in Self-Driving Tractors, Smart Crop Sprayers

Umpressive directions in agriculture automation ...

Deere Invests Billions in Self-Driving Tractors, Smart Crop Sprayers

One side of the John Deere See & Spray Ultimate’s 120-foot sprayer boom, which features 36 cameras.

The Wall Street Journal

Bob Tita; Jacob Bunge

September 11, 2022

Agricultural machinery manufacturer Deere is investing billions of dollars to launch self-driving tractors and intelligent crop sprayers this year. Deere CEO John May predicts software use fees will constitute 10% of the company’s annual revenue by 2030. The sprayers use computer vision to differentiate crops from weeds and to more precisely target herbicide sprays. By 2026, Deere aims to connect 1.5 million machines in operation and 500 million acres in use to its cloud-based John Deere Operations Center, which will collect and retain crop data. Last year, Deere bought the Bear Flag Robotics startup to provide software to make older tractors capable of autonomous use. The company is wagering it can alleviate farmers' anxiety of losing control over their equipment by offering software-as-a-service on an as-needed basis for specific tasks.

Update on Autonomous Cars

Still waiting ...

Where Are The Autonomous Cars?

By Semiconductor Engineering, August 9, 2022

Level 5 vehicles, which are self-driving in all road situations, do not yet exist. Moreover, it’s not clear when that will change.

Are we there yet? Governments, consumers, and engineers alike want to know how close the automotive world is to producing a fully autonomous Level 5 vehicle.

While some experts say such vehicles could hit the road in the next few years, they're a shrinking minority. Most forecasts say a truly self-driving car is at least a decade away — and maybe much longer, because it requires disruptive technology that has yet to be invented.

At stake are billions of dollars-worth of automotive and tech industry profits, as well as an untold number of human lives. More than a million people around the world die each year in road deaths according to the World Health Organization, though the extent to which such deaths are fully attributable to driver error and could be prevented by high-tech cars is up for debate. Still, the European Union is reportedly planning to approve the sale of Level 4 vehicles — those that are fully autonomous within a specific geographic area or set of circumstances — as part of its attempt to reach zero road deaths by 2050.

There are currently no such cars on the market. Level 4 technology is employed in Waymo ridesharing, a taxi service by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise, and a handful of other projects, but not in consumer vehicles. Level 3, which requires the driver to take over when the system encounters a problem, currently can be found in select Mercedes models in Germany and a small number of Honda Legends in Japan. Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in Teslas and other high-tech cars available to consumers typically are classified as Level 2.

From semiconductor Engineering

View Full Article   

Still Waiting for Fully Self-Driving Cars

What's the real status Among the real players?    Here is quite a lot of data to use.

Still Waiting for Self-Driving Cars

By Keith Kirkpatrick

Communications of the ACM, April 2022, Vol. 65 No. 4, Pages 12-14  10.1145/3516517

Over the past decade, technology and automotive pundits have predicted the "imminent" arrival of fully autonomous vehicles that can drive on public roads without any active monitoring or input from a human driver. Elon Musk has predicted his company Tesla would deliver fully autonomous vehicles by the end of 2021, but he made similar predictions in 2020, 2019, and 2017. Each prediction has fallen flat, largely due to real-world safety concerns, particularly related to how self-driving cars perform in adverse conditions or situations.

The State of Self-Driving Cars Today

Despite such proclamations from Tesla, which released its optimistically named Full Self Driving capability for AutoPilot in October 2021, fully automated self-driving cars have not yet arrived. Instead, most manufacturers are offering systems that feature capabilities that generally fall within the first three of the six levels of autonomy defined by the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE), which range from Level 0 (no driving automation) to Level 5 (full self-driving capabilities under all conditions).

Most new cars today feature some Level 1 driver assistance technology, including automatic braking, lane-keeping assist, and adaptive cruise control. More advanced systems like Tesla's Autopilot or General Motors' Super Cruise, fall into the Level 2 classification indicating the car can autonomously manage its speed and steering, but requires the driver to remain focused and able to take control in the event of an adverse event. Other manufacturers, such as Honda and Audi, are focusing on Level 3 autonomous systems that allow the car to take complete control, but only under very specific conditions, such as low-speed driving in traffic, in good weather, and only on preapproved roads.

"I'm sure a lot of manufacturers would like to spring over Level 2 and Level 3, to the greatest extent possible," says Peter Hancock, a Pegasus Professor and Provost Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida.

However, the most likely scenario under which Level 4-capable vehicles will arrive may be through the deployment of autonomous long-haul trucks. Hancock says that due to global truck driver shortages, there likely will be a stronger push to develop autonomous trucks, at least across interstate highways in the U.S., which are constructed to a specific design standard, are usually in good physical condition, and feature physical barriers between oncoming traffic.

Indeed, Aurora Innovation announced it is building a Level 4 autonomous system and plans to launch its autonomous trucking business in 2023, followed by our autonomous ride-hailing business in 2024. The company told Communications it has partnered with FedEx, Uber, Toyota, and truck OEMs (Volvo and PACCAR) to develop a partnership ecosystem focused on bringing self-driving technology to market. ... '

Ahead for Augmented Reality

Heads up for the road ahead.  Good piece.

Home/News/The Road Ahead for Augmented Reality/Full Text

The Road Ahead for Augmented Reality, By Keith Kirkpatrick

Communications of the ACM, December 2021, Vol. 64 No. 12, Pages 20-22   10.1145/3490317

Automotive head-up displays (HUDs), systems that transparently project critical vehicle information into the driver's field of vision, were developed originally for military aviation use, with the origin of the name stemming from a pilot being able to view information with his or her head positioned "up" and looking forward, rather than positioned "down" to look at the cockpit gauges and instruments. The HUD projects and superimposes data in the pilot's natural field of view (FOV), providing the added benefit of eliminating the pilot's need to refocus when switching between the outside view and the instruments, which can impact reaction time, efficiency, and safety, particularly in combat situations.

In cars, the main concern is distracted driving, or the act of taking the driver's attention away from the road. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, distracted driving claimed 3,142 lives in 2019, the most recent year for which statistics have been published. Looking away from the road for even five seconds at a speed of 55 mph is the equivalent of driving the length of a football field with one's eyes closed.

As such, the desire to ensure that drivers keep their eyes focused on the road, instead of looking down at the gauges on the dashboard, was the impetus for the development of HUDs suitable for use in production automobiles. The first automotive HUD that was included as original equipment was found on the 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and Pontiac Grand Prix; both were monochromatic, and displayed only a digital readout of the speedometer.

Thanks to the increasing inclusion of a variety of automotive sensors and cameras, advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) features and functions (such as automatic braking, forward collision avoidance, lane-keeping assist, and blind-spot monitoring, among others), and more powerful on-vehicle processors, automakers have been installing HUD units in commercial vehicles that provide more essential driving data, such as speed, engine RPMs, compass heading, directional signal indicators, fuel economy, and other basic information, allowing the driver to concentrate on the road instead of looking down to check the dash or an auxiliary screen.

The technology enabling most types of HUD is based on the use of a processor to generate a digital image of data coming from sensors. These images then are digitally projected from a unit located in the dash of the car onto a mirror or mirrors, which then reflect that image onto either a separate screen located behind the steering wheel, or onto the vehicle's windshield, directly in the driver's forward view. Common projection and display technologies used include liquid crystal display (LCD), liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), digital micromirror devices (DMDs), and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which have replaced the cathode ray tube (CRT) systems used in the earliest HUDs, as they suffered from brightness degradation over time.

The HUDs that project the information onto a separate transparent screen are called combiner HUDs; these were popular because the physical space required to install the system was modest, and because the system was fully integrated, OEMs did not need to design a system that accounted for each vehicle's unique windshield angle or position. However, this type of HUD was limited by several factors; namely, the optical viewing path of a combiner HUD is shorter than looking through a windshield, and the driver's eyes must refocus slightly to the shorter visual distance when switching between looking out the windshield and checking the display. Furthermore, there is a practical limit to the size and field of vision (FOV) offered by combiner units; adding mirrors and a larger combiner screen would apper obtrusive and less elegant in a modern vehicle than simply using the windshield as a display surface.

Because HUDs were far from being standard automotive equipment in most vehicles, companies such as HUDWAY and Navdy had produced phone mounts and screens designed to allow a smartphone to operate as a head-up display. Essentially, these designs functioned as combiner systems, in that they required a separate screen on which to view the display and suffered from many of the same limitations as OEM-equipped combiner HUD systems. While Navdy went out of business in 2018, HUDWAY is still accepting orders for its HUDWAY Drive system at a cost of $229 per unit.

The technical limitations of combiner systems have driven most automotive OEMs to offer HUDs that project information directly onto the windshield and contain a far greater amount of data, known as W-type HUDs. These more-advanced systems incorporate ADAS system status information (such as displaying the status of adaptive cruise control systems, automatic braking systems, collision-avoidance technology, infrared night-vision technology, lane-keeping assist technology, and, eventually, semi-autonomous self-driving system data.

The most advanced systems include augmented reality technology, which involves superimposing specific enhanced symbols or images into the HUD onto real-world objects or roadways to provide more information, detail, and clarity to the driver. Some systems will also incorporate data from GPS navigation systems, such as clear directional graphics, street names, augmented lane markings, signposts and route numbers, and even representations of other vehicles/objects on the road. Examples of vehicles that include this technology today include the Audi Q4 E-tron, Mercedes Benz S Class, and the Hyundai IONIQ 5.   ..... ' 

Sciam Says Self Driving Cars Emergent

Scientific American takes a look at a self driving future

'Self-Driving' Cars Begin to Emerge from a Cloud of Hype    By Scientific American, September 27, 2021

Although some observers may perceive that the bloom is off the rose for automated driving in this post-hype environment, the current situation actually marks a sign of progress. More realistic views of the opportunities and challenges for automated driving will motivate better-focused investment of resources and alignment of public perceptions with reality.

We should expect some limited implementations of automated long-haul trucking on low-density, rural highways and automated local small-package delivery in urban and suburban settings during the current decade. Automated urban and suburban ride-hailing services could become available on a limited basis as well, but the location-specific challenges to their deployment are sufficient that this is unlikely to reach a national scale soon.

From Scientific American