High-Tech Pavement Markers Support Autonomous Driving in Tough Conditions

 High-Tech Pavement Markers Support Autonomous Driving in Tough Conditions, Remote Areas

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

June 20, 2023

Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Western Michigan University have enabled raised pavement markers to transmit global positioning information that improves autonomous driving in remote areas or during inclement weather. The researchers embedded low-powered sensors within the markers that send information to passing cars about road shape even when obstructions reduce the reliability of vehicle cameras or light detection and ranging (LiDAR). The technology hands over some data processing from the car's software to infrastructure, saving electric vehicle battery power and broadening driving range. The researchers said electrical vehicle navigation systems use up to 90% less power when navigating with the sensor-equipped pavement markers, compared to leading camera and LiDAR-based autonomous driving technology.   ... ' 

Putting Limits to Vehicle Tech

Limits of autonomous vehicle tech?

Carmakers Are Pushing Autonomous Tech. This Engineer Wants Limits.   By The New York Times.February 16, 2023

Systems like General Motors Super Cruise can steer, brake and accelerate vehicles on their own.

Companies sometimes market these systems as if they made cars autonomous. But their legal fine print requires drivers to stay alert and be ready to take control of the vehicle at any time.

Last fall, Missy Cummings sent a document to her colleagues at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that revealed a surprising trend: When people using advanced driver-assistance systems die or are injured in a car crash, they are more likely to have been speeding than people driving cars on their own.

The two-page analysis of nearly 400 crashes involving systems like Tesla's Autopilot and General Motors' Super Cruise is far from conclusive. But it raises fresh questions about the technologies that have been installed in hundreds of thousands of cars on U.S. roads. Dr. Cummings said the data indicated that drivers were becoming too confident in the systems' abilities and that automakers and regulators should restrict when and how the technology was used.

People "are over-trusting the technology," she said. "They are letting the cars speed. And they are getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them."

From The New York Times

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Closer Autonomous Vehicular

 Research Brings Safer Autonomous Vehicles a Step Closer

University of Surrey (U.K.), June 9, 2022

Scientists at the U.K.'s University of Surrey have brought safer autonomous vehicles a step closer by using artificial intelligence to render two-dimensional images into a bird's-eye view map. Surrey's Avishkar Saha said, "Our model exploits the one-to-one correspondence between a vertical line in an image and rays passing through the camera location in an overhead map. This allows our technology to treat an image in a similar way that artificial intelligence solves language translations." The technology transforms a column of pixels in an image into one ray along a map, resulting in 15% greater accuracy than other commercially available technologies..... '

Continued Work on Autonomous Apple Car

More care effort from Apple.

Apple Accelerates Work on Car Project, Aiming for Fully Autonomous Vehicle

By Mark Gurman +Follow   in Bloomberg

November 18, 2021, 12:26 PM EST Updated on November 18, 2021, 12:38 PM EST

 Company looks to refocus project on self-driving capabilities

 New car chief Kevin Lynch pushing for debut as early as 2025 

Apple Inc. is pushing to accelerate development of its electric car and is refocusing the project around full self-driving capabilities, according to people familiar with the matter, aiming to solve a technical challenge that has bedeviled the auto industry. 

For the past several years, Apple’s car team had explored two simultaneous paths: creating a model with limited self-driving capabilities focused on steering and acceleration -- similar to many current cars -- or a version with full self-driving ability that doesn’t require human intervention.

US-IT-APPLE-NEWS-FEED

Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology.Photographer: Brittany Hosea-Small/AFP/Getty Images

Under the effort’s new leader -- Apple Watch software executive Kevin Lynch -- engineers are now concentrating on the second option. Lynch is pushing for a car with a full self-driving system in the first version, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.   ... '