The desert state is the first to grant the vehicles a licence to use public roads. They are controlled by computers processing a combination of mapping data, radar, laser sensors and video feeds.

Rick Ross Cops Meek Mill A Range Rover » RapRadar

Nevada Approves License for Google’s Self-Driving Car » PCmag

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Seized Hip-Hop Site Lashes Out At Feds, RIAA » Wired

Bots beat humans probing brain’s neural activity » CNET

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Nevada has issued the country’s first license to test self-driving cars on public roads, and Google’s name is on it.

The Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday that the worldwide technology company met the state’s requirements after demonstrating the cars in the capital of Carson City and on the Las Vegas Strip.

DMV Director Bruce Breslow says the cars will display easily recognizable red plates. They’ll also feature an infinity symbol, which Breslow says best represents the car of the future.

Once the autonomous cars are out of the test phase and on the market, the plates will be green.

Nevada is the first state to regulate self-driving cars, which work like an auto-pilot to guide a vehicle with little or no intervention from the human driver.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

So here’s where I’m going to revisit the ideas that have been bubbling in my head since I wrote “The future will swallow your job” a couple of months back.

The column was based on Google’s self-driving car, or rather cars. The tech company has built a fleet of them, and they have collectively driven more than 200,000 miles over the past two years, on highways and in major city centres. Google is putting a person behind the wheel, but they don’t touch the controls. The Google car is a direct descendant of the cars that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in the middle of the Oughts. Apparently, the technology has been coming along by leaps and bounds.

To give you an idea of how good Google’s car apparently is, here’s a chunk of January’s Wired Magazine story about the fleet:

The last time I was in a self-driving car—Stanford University’s “Junior,” at the 2008 World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems—the VW Passat went 25 miles per hour down two closed-off blocks. Its signal achievement seemed to be stopping for a stop sign at an otherwise unoccupied intersection. Now, just a few years later, we are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway—a stunning demonstration of just how quickly, and dramatically, the horizon of possibility is expanding. “This car can do 75 mph,” Urmson says. “It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds.” In short, after almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.

So far, the only crash has been when a person was driving the car.

(Google has said it expects self-driving cars to be on the market in 10 years – I have a bet with my editor that that will happen; he says no. I think I’m going to get some easy money in 2022!)

There are still some technological questions about the self-driving cars. One of the big ones I haven’t been able to find answered is, how does the car deal with snow, either on the sensors or on the roads? That will be a pretty big hurdle for a lot of the world, since it covers up lines, road edges, and even street signs. Humans can deal with snow (or not deal with it, ask a tow truck driver) through context and follow-the-leader-behaviour. Will GPS and sensors conquer that problem?

That said, most of the “robot car” problems were considered intractable just a decade ago. Half a decade ago, robot cars were clumsy and unreliable. Now there is the Google car, and half a dozen other proof-of-concept vehicles made by auto manufacturers like Audi and Chrysler that are either fully autonomous, or moving swiftly in that direction. Google has been talking to the auto industry and pushing for legislation to allow self-driving cars.

So what happens if they work out the kinks and we get to buy self-driving vehicles in the next 10 years? What are the implications?

In my column, I wrote a bit about the economic disruption. I see Wal-Mart as one of the major forces behind getting self-driving vehicles on the road. Why? Because Wal-Mart thrives on a just-in-time delivery model. They move a lot of stuff on tight schedules. That means a lot of trucks. Thousands, probably tens of thousands just in the United States to shuttle goods from ports to warehouses to stores. What are the costs of a fleet of long- and short-haul trucks? You have the capital costs of the vehicle, its maintenance, fuel, and depreciation, insurance – and the driver. In the long run, the driver is the most expensive component. So what if you could remove that component? You save money. You cut costs and improve profits. So Wal-Mart – and Amazon.com, and The Bay, and Sears, and Rona, and Home Depot, and IKEA, and Safeway, and every other company that relies on shipping – will want this.

Even though it throws tens of thousands of people out of work.

Trucks are also a good test bed for this technology because they tend to follow predictable, regular routes and do a lot of highway driving.

What’s next? What also follows a model like that?

Buses.

TransLink needs money. How much money could they save if they fired all their drivers? They spend more than $600 million a year on bus service alone, and while I couldn’t find the figure for driver’s salaries in their basic financial statements, it runs into the tens or hundreds of millions, easily.

So the bus drivers go.

How about taxi drivers?

Okay, they’re toast. Again, if it’s cheaper, robots outcompete humans.

So let’s look ahead five to 10 years after self-driving vehicles become commonplace. What are the longer term effects?

Some goods are cheaper, because shipping costs have dropped (unless oil costs have gone through the roof at the same time, cancelling it all out). But we don’t notice that much in our day to day lives.

Many of us no longer drive when we drive. We have time to read or play with our phones or surf the net while we head to work or the grocery store. Pretty soon, Xboxes and Playstations will be common in cars, along with something like home theatre systems to watch movies. Why not?

But why own a car in the first place?

Remember, the price of taking a trip by bus has gone down, and the price of taking a cab has gone way down. You can email or text message for a car to pick you up, and it comes and gets you. It drops you off, and then takes off to pick up someone else. The car picking you up might be a taxi, but it might also be part of a car-sharing co-op, or a neighbourhood shuttle service, or it might be a subsidized service that shows you TV shows – with ads, of course – while you get to your destination. If we do get self-driving cars, I expect car ownership to drop, possibly sharply, especially in cities. A lot of people who are on the edge of getting rid of a car or two will be pushed over, because self-driving cheaper taxi service makes it that much more convenient. Why pay for a car, insurance, gas, and parking when you could pay less than half that for a car share membership that is, say, 90 per cent as efficient?

What other changes might we see?

When I was a kid growing up in the outer suburbs, I was desperate to get my driver’s license, because then I didn’t have to get my parents to drive me everywhere. If cars drive themselves, there’s no reason why a 12-year-old can’t visit a friend across town by himself in the family car, or in a car-sharing vehicle. Kids, seniors, and people with impairments that keep them from driving – visual impairments, epilepsy – will have a greater degree of freedom. Google has already been pushing the idea of the blind being able to use its cars.

Emergency vehicle use gets interesting. If the systems are good enough, they will be able to handle driving far faster than would be safe for human paramedics, police, or firefighters. And the other cars on the road will get signals that tell them to get the heck out of the way, and unlike human drivers, they will all do so. So emergency response times might actually drop. We could see the 250 km/h police response vehicle, designed for incredible speed, with its officers essentially cargo until they get to the scene of the incident.

As a sidebar to that, we’ll have a lot fewer accidents, especially drunk driving accidents. Courts can afford to be incredibly strict with driving bans, (Two speeding tickets? Lose your license! Get a car that drives you!), and those who continue to drive may face increasingly strict licensing requirements. ICBC may have to be dramatically scaled back, or simply privatized.

So if our driving and car use habits change, what changes flow from that?

Weirdly, we’ll see the rebirth of the full-service gas station. If a lot of cars don’t have anyone behind the wheel, we’ll need people to pump gas into them when they stop for fuel. (Or we build robots for that, too.)

We might see a lot of cars that are specialized for seemingly odd tasks, or tasks that are currently uncommon. Mobile billboards. Vending machine cars selling you Coke or ice cream bars or microwaved burritos by the side of the road. Art cars that exist to shock or amaze as they drive past. Delivery cars that will bring almost anything you can buy online, to wherever you happen to be at the moment. News cars with cameras that speed to the scene of a fire or murder to get footage.

Then we might see parking lots shrink, and in some places, vanish.

Cars are one of the most expensive items we buy, which sit idle for most of their lives. A personally-owned car spends 70-95 per cent of its life parked. If more people give up having their own car, then we need fewer parking spaces, in apartment buildings, in neighbourhoods, and especially around malls and in city centres. Expect parking lots to be filled in and reduced in size, with more stores and apartments taking their place. It’s a good place to find more land as our society gets denser and more averse to paving over fields and forests. Instead, we’ll see systems of roadways and drop-off and loading zones at malls and workplaces, much like we see at airports and bus loops.

If there is a big tip towards taxis and fleet vehicles and away from private ownership, we’ll see a big ecosystem of maintenance yards where cars are serviced on regular schedules. That will partly replace the existing auto repair shops and oil change businesses.

Beyond that? No idea. I know that if we get self-driving cars, there will be effects that I can’t predict, and that no one could predict. The people who invented the internet never predicted spambots, online poker, flashmobs, YouTube, or Facebook. We might be on the cusp of a technology that will change our lives as dramatically as the internet already has. Like the internet, we will not be able to predict how people will make use of it.

The self-driving car is one of several possible disruptive technologies that I suspect are possible, but which aren’t here yet.

For the record, the others are: robotic clothing production (hugely economically disruptive, could throw tens of millions of Asian garment labourers out of work, and make modern clothing stores obsolete – you’d never buy a piece of clothing that wasn’t custom-fitted for you and ordered online), cheap, highly efficient batteries (could replace the internal combustion engine) cheap solar power, and additive manufacturing.

Oh technologies

Note: This isn’t a commercial, but it can be considered a viral video to gain people’s attention through social outlets to get a gist of what Google is doing. Fantastic ..!

The car, which has completed over 200,000 miles of test driving, utilises various radars and lasers to enable a smooth, unaided journey through traffic conditions. The modified ‘Toyota Prius’ has provided legally blind Californian man, Steve Mahan, with the everyday connivence so many of us take for granted. He says that the technology ”gives me the independence and the flexibility to go to the places I both want to go and need to go when I need to do those things.”

This revolutionary advancement sees the future mould into the present as the futuristic notion of self operational machines become a reality. Despite the abundant praise by several articles of ‘Google’ and their disability support efforts, many worry that this development will mark one of the first steps of mankind’s complete dependancy on machines, and on a simpler note – the mark of the laziness of the modern man.

Will this invention lead to the redundancy of human driving skills? Or is it simply an valuable progression in the assistance of the disabled? We may just have to wait and see where this self driving car takes us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

Wait, what ? Did you say “Green” Innovation ? How exactly ?

Let me explain how I think it is a Green solution. Imagine that in the future all the cars running on the roads are self driving cars. Whats the biggest advantage of this ? First of all, it will free us all a lot of time to do other things while we are travelling. Secondly, consider the current way in which people drive.

1. People want to travel at different speeds.

2. People do not like to be in the lane that is moving slow, so people are constantly switching lanes in order to be in the faster moving lane.

3. People get bored driving at the same constant speed, they some times speed up, passing someone etc.

In short, the picture looks like this.

This causes a lot of fuel inefficiencies.

Now consider this new scenario in which all the cars are self driven.

1. If all cars are self driven, they all can be programmed to use the same algorithm.

2. Cars don’t get bored driving at the same speed or following the same car for a long time.

3. There wont be any necessity to change lanes, pass other cars etc. Everyone moves at the exact same speed, following the car in front, maintaining an algorithmically calculated safe distance.

In short, the future would look like this.

This actually saves a lot of fuel. There is very little braking and acceleration involved and the cars will be very fuel efficient.

Think of this as mass customization of public transportation.

This is like combining the positives of public and private transportation. You get the benefit of fuel efficiency of public transportation and you get the convenience of door to door private transportation.

To further enhance the efficiency, each car should be a single passenger car with a relatively smaller engine. This makes the cars even more efficient and increases utilization. (Think Southwest !)

• Holy crap! So the 1st ever 1080 (3 – 360º Spins) on a skateboard was finally landed by a 12 year old! Damn, I feel so old. (REDBULL)
• Thanks to Apple, working conditions at China’s Foxconn high-tech factories will start to get better soon. Capitalism FTW! (FASTCO)
• A lucky VA man received a full face & jaw transplant 15 years after a gun accident left him without a nose, lips or teeth! (MSNBC)
• Check out the Too Short & E-40 Money On the Floor music video that one of my homies & new hero, Adam Z., camera Op’d for. (VEVO)
• Spike Lee paid an “undisclosed amount” to the elderly couple who’s addy he tweeted, instead of George Zimmerman’s. Good form, Spike! (EW)
• A legally blind man used Google’s self-driving car to run a few errands around his town. The future is gonna be so awesome! (POPSCI)
• So LINSANITY’s on hiatus ’til next year, but did the Knicks really delay the announcement to sell a few more tickets? C.R.E.A.M!!! (NYDAILY)

This is Video Roundup; the best web videos I have seen in the last week.

Self-Driving Car

The future is here!

Robot Band

Robots doing the song Moves Like Jagger.

Sand Flea Robot

This is very cool!

Dear the Cleveland Browns

Please improve your team.

Indie Animation

Great animated music video.

Eat it Don’t Tweet It

Taking a shot at food bloggers.

Obama Spoof

Singing Sexy and I Know It.

Ray Lewis Speech

Great speech toward the Stanford basketball team.

Stockholm Speech

Great use of iPads!

Pregnant and I Know it

Another funny video!

Rabbit Shooting

This is not a liked video.

Giant Paper Airplane

It actually flew!

Animal House

Cats, Foxes, and Eagles; oh my!

Military Homecoming

High School senior gets a great surprise!

Military Homecoming

Family gets a great surprise!

Related articles

• Video Roundup (youngsblog.com)
• Video Roundup (youngsblog.com)

Any thoughts?

A man gets behind the wheel of his Toyota Prius, drives to a local Taco Bell and orders lunch it the drive-thru lane.

What’s so unusual about that scenario?

Steve Mahan, a California resident, is legally blind. But he navigated the trip without a hitch behind the wheel of Google’s self-driving car, which has completed more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving on American roads.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is in China to address production labor problems. (Reuters)

The European Union begins an investigation of the United Technologies (NYSE: UTX) bid for Goodrich (NYSE: GR). (Reuters)

Fed Chairman Bernanke says “easy money” remains necessary because of the slow jobs recovery. (WSJ)

Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD) and Enbridge (NYSE: ENB) of Calgary plan to create a pipeline that will compete with the Keystone XL. (WSJ)

German consumer confidence slips in a recent poll by GfK. (WSJ)

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) will sell its new high-end Lumia 900 smartphone for $99.99 in the U.S. (WSJ)

Chancellor Merkel says she supports a temporary increase in European bailout funds. (WSJ)

The Federal Trade Commission will ask Congress to examine new digital privacy rules. (WSJ)

AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) cannot delay the distribution of generic versions of its antipsychotic drug Seroquel. (WSJ)

Banks that did poorly in recent stress tests performed by the Fed want data used to make the decisions. (WSJ)

Some states may run pension plans for companies. (NYT)

BWM recalls 1.3 million cars due to battery flaws. (NYT)

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) plans to enter the electronic bond trading industry. (FT)

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) inches closer to the release of a self-driving car. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

Self-driving Audi TT

Will robots soon become our ideal chauffeurs? Considering that each year 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents worldwide, any help robots can offer would be most welcome. Luckily, car technology has been a particularly fertile sector for robotics.

Move over KITT, now there’s the Audi TT. Developed by Audi and graduates from Stanford University, this car is one of the world’s most advanced robotically assisted automobiles. In 2010, the self-driving car navigated the twists and turns of Colorado’s Pikes Peak mountain. Using state of the art GPS technology that communicated its position to within less than an inch, the car finished the 12.42-mile course in 27 minutes. An expert rally driver usually reaches the 14,110-foot summit in 17 minutes.

(For more robotic cars, check out the iPad-controlled car or the Tailbot, a robotic car inspired by leaping lizards.)

Raytheon XOS 2 exoskeleton suit

Robots have been used for some time in military operations, particularly to locate and defuse bombs. Soldiers often operate these robots remotely, but the Raytheon’s XOS 2 robotic exoskeleton suit is an interesting melding of human and machine.

Like a cross between the suit that comic book hero Tony Stark dons as Iron Man and the cargo loader that Ripley maneuvers in “Aliens,” the XOS 2 enables the soldier inside to lift more than 16,000 pounds in a day without feeling fatigued. The combination of its high-powered internal combustion engine and high-pressure hydraulics makes the XOS 2 a formidable piece of kit. Although it is still being developed, this type of robot machinery may soon be seen in factories and freight yards.

Robonaut 2

The “Star Wars” film universe was heavily populated by robots, and these days they are a very real and vital part of the NASA space program. Launched on its final mission, the Discovery space shuttle carried six people and one humanoid robot named Robonaut 2. Robonaut 2 will perform routine chores and dangerous tasks onboard the International Space Station, enabling the rest of the crew to focus on their work. It can also perform maintenance and repairs on the ship’s exterior, an especially risky job for humans.

ASIMO

Designed to help people who lack full mobility, Honda’s ASIMO debuted in 2000. In 2011, a streamlined and more autonomous model was unveiled. The new model has enhanced visual and auditory sensors. These sensors enable ASIMO to process information faster and more effectively, which helps it learn from its environment. ASIMO famously appeared on the British quiz show, “QI,” in December 2011. On the show, ASIMO politely served host Stephen Fry a cup of tea, danced with contestant Jo Brand, and then beat its human competition in the quiz.

ECCEROBOT-2

This year’s stars of the Robotville Festival at the London Science Museum were two super-advanced humanoid robots, the ECCEROBOT-2 and iCub. Developed by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the ECCEROBOT-2 has realistic muscles and tendons made from elastic. This  musculature works in conjunction with 80 DC motors to mimic human movements and actions.

iCub

The iCub was created by the RobotCub Consortium, a group of European researchers who study artificial intelligence and human cognition. Standing about three feet high, the iCub has a childlike face, which uses sensors to decide which facial expressions to make.

The iCub has learned an astonishing range of tasks, including crawling, walking and archery. (It can hit the mark dead center.) Its ability to mimic human actions has earned the iCub a great deal of attention — and a nomination to be a torch bearer for the London 2012 Olympics.

More advanced robots will continue to rise, making a world populated by humans and humanoid robots seem less like fantasy and more like reality.

Daniel Butler works at VroomVroomVroom, a car rental company based in the UK. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user JohnGreenaway.

The concept took a big step when Nevada became the first state to approve regulations that spell out requirements for companies to test driverless cars on state roads.

“Then they have to take us out and prove that they can do it,” Bruce Breslow, director of the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, said of the autonomous vehicles. “They’re not ready to go to market yet.”

But Nevada intends to be ready when they are, and officials hope to stay ahead of other states such as Florida and Hawaii that are considering similar testing regulations, Breslow said.

Gov. Brian Sandoval took a test ride in a self-driving Toyota Prius in July. The car being developed by Google Inc. uses radar, sensors and computers that allow the vehicle to drive itself, though human drivers can override the autopilot function.

Companies that want to conduct testing in Nevada will need a bond of $1 million to $3 million, depending on the number of cars they plan to test. Firms also must lay out their specific intentions, such as testing a vehicle on urban roadways, or its ability to operate in the fog, rain or snow, and provide testing data to the state.

The cars must have two people in them at all times, with one able to take control. The new regulations approved last week also require companies to detail license requirements for people to operate them when they become available.

Cars must be equipped with separate data collectors — similar to the “black box” on an aircraft — that will “capture and store the autonomous technology sensor data for at least 30 seconds before a collision.”

The regulations go beyond testing procedures, anticipating the day when driverless cars become a reality on highways.

If a vehicle is certified as capable of being driven in autonomous mode without a driver, a person can operate the vehicle “without being physically present,” one provision says.

Whether there’s a human driver or not, the regulations hold the operator responsible regardless of whether the person is physically present in the autonomous vehicle.

The only exception to traffic laws is texting or talking on a hand-held cellphone. A law passed by legislators last year to ban texting while driving included a specific exemption for operators of self-driving cars on autopilot.

But the vehicles won’t be a substitute for a designated driver after a night on the town, Breslow said.

“There is no exemption for drinking and driving,” he said.

(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

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2012 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game Will Include Hip Hop Artists J. Cole x Common /ThisBeatGoes/

Abuse Cases Put Los Angeles School District Under Fire /NYTimes/

Whitney Houston Death Jokes Earn a Suspension for Radio Duo /Reuters/

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