Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless division, has a post about autonomous-car parking, which comes in different grades of difficulty depending on where the vehicle is stowing itself. Communal rides like taxis and other rideshares will have the easiest time since their mission is largely driving, not parking. An excerpt:

The taxi doesn’t park
One of the simplest solutions to parking involves robotaxi service. Such vehicles don’t really park, at least not where they dropped you off. They drop you off and go to their next customer. If they don’t have another ride, they can deliberately go to a place where they know they can easily park to wait. They don’t need to tackle a parking space that’s challenging at all.

Simple non-crowded lots
Parking in basic parking lots — typical open ground lots that are not close to full — is a pretty easy problem. So easy in fact, that we’ve seen a number of demonstrations, ranging back to Junior 3 and Audi Piloted Parking. Cars in the showroom now will identify parking spots for you (and tell you if you fit.) They have done basic parallel parking (with you on the brakes) for several years, and are starting to now even do it with you out of the car (but watching from a distance.) At CES VW showed the special case of parking in your own garage or driveway, where you show the car where it’s going to go.

The early demos required empty parking lots with no pedestrians, and even no other moving cars, but today reasonably well-behaved other cars should not be a big problem. That’s the thing about non-crowded lots: People are not hunting or competing for spaces. The robocars actually would be very happy to seek out the large empty sections at the back of most parking lots because you aren’t going to be walking out that far, the car is going to come get you.

The biggest issue is the question of pedestrians who can appear out from behind a minivan. The answer to this is simply that vehicles that are parking can and do go slow, and slow automatically gives you a big safety boost. At parking lot speed, you really can stop very quickly if a pedestrian appears out of nowhere.

More crowded lots
The challenge of parking lots, in spite of the low speeds, is that they don’t have well defined rules of the road. People ignore the arrows on the ground. They pause and wait for cars to exit. In really crowded lots, cars follow people who are leaving at walking speed, hoping to get dibs on their spot. They wait, blocking traffic, for a spot they claim as theirs. People fight for spots and steal spots. People park badly and cross over the lines.

As far as I know, nobody has tried to solve this challenge, and so it remains unsolved.•

In a new blog post, Google driverless-auto consultant Brad Templeton explains one of the most challenging obstacles robocars will have to circumvent: ever-changing highways and byways. An excerpt:

“The road has changed

Let’s get to the big issue — the map is wrong, usually because construction has changed it.

First of all, we must understand that the sensors always disagree with the map, because the sensors are showing all the other cars and pedestrians etc. Any car has to be able to perceive these and drive so as not to hit them. If a traffic cone, ‘road closed’ sign or flagman appears in the road, a car is not going to just plow into them because they are not on the map! The car already knows where not to go, the question is where it should go when the lanes have changed.

Even vehicles not rated to drive any road without a map can probably still do basic navigation and stay within their lane markers without a map. For the 10,000 miles of driving you do in a year, you need a car that does that 99.99999% of the time (for which you want a map) but it may be acceptable to have a car that’s only 99.9% able to do that for the occasional mile of restriped road. Indeed, when there are other, human-driven cars on the road, a very good strategy is just to follow them — follow one in front, and watch cars to the side. If the car has a clear path following new lane markers or other cars, it can do so.

Google, for example, has shown videos of their vehicle detecting traffic cones and changing lanes to obey the cones. That’s today — it is only going to get better at this.

But not all the time. There will be times when the lanes are unclear (sometimes the old lanes are still visible or the new ones are not well marked.) If there are no other cars to follow, there are also no other cars to hit, and no other traffic to block.

Still, there will be times when the car is not sure of where to go, and will need help. Of course, if there is a passenger in the car, as there would be most of the time, that passenger can help. They don’t need to be a licenced driver, they just need to be somebody who can point on the screen and tell the car which of the possible paths it is considering is the right one. Or guide it with something like a joystick — not physically driving but just guiding the car as to where to go, where to turn.

If the car is empty, and has a network connection, it can send a picture, 3-D scan and low-res video to a remote help station, where a person can draw a path for the car to go for its next 100 meters, and keep doing that. Not steering the car but helping it solve the problem of ‘where is my lane?’ The car will be cautious and stop or pull over for any situation where it is not sure of where to go, and the human just helps it get over that, and confirms where it is safe to go.

If the car is unmanned and has no network connection of any kind, and can’t figure out the road, then it will pull over, or worst case, stop and wait for a human to come and help. Is that acceptable? Turns out it probably is, due to one big factor:

This only applies to the first car to encounter an unplanned, unreported construction zone

We all drive construction zones every day. But it’s much more rare that we are the first car to drive the construction zone as they are setting it up. And most of the rules I describe above are only for the first connected car to encounter a surprise change to the road. In other words, it’s not going to happen very often. Once a car encounters a surprise change to the road, it will report the problem with the map. Immediately all other cars will know about the zone.”

That last 5% of perfecting autonomous vehicles may be more difficult than the first 95%, and driverless options will likely continue to be introduced incrementally rather than all at once, but if such a system is 100% realized, there will be all manner of ramifications. In a post on his blog, Google driverless sector consultant Brad Templeton looks at the possible outcomes in such a brave new world. An excerpt:

“When I talk about robocars, I often get quite opposite reactions:

• Americans, in particular, will never give up car ownership! You can pry the bent steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.
• I can’t see why anybody would own a car if there were fast robotaxi service!
• Surely human drivers will be banned from the roads before too long.

I predict neither extreme will be true. I predict the market will offer all options to the public, and several options will be very popular. I am not even sure which will be the most popular.

1. Many people will stick to buying and driving classic, manually driven cars. The newer versions of these cars will have fancy ADAS systems that make them much harder to crash, and their accident levels will be lower.
2. Many will buy a robocar for their near-exclusive use. It will park near where it drops them off and always be ready. It will keep their stuff in the trunk.
3. People who live and work in an area with robotaxi service will give up car ownership, and hire for all their needs, using a wide variety of vehicles.
4. Some people will purchase a robocar mostly for their use, but will hire it out when they know they are not likely to use it, allowing them to own a better car. They will make rarer use of robotaxi services to cover specialty trips or those times when they hired it out and ended up needing it. Their stuff will stay in a special locker in the car.”

Via Google driverless-car consultant Brad Templeton, a report about Singapore’s limited test run of autonomous public transport:

“In late August, I visited Singapore to give an address at a special conference announcing a government sponsored collaboration involving their Ministry of Transport, the Land Transport Authority and A-STAR, the government funded national R&D centre. I got a chance to meet the minister and sit down with officials and talk about their plans, and 6 months earlier I got the chance to visit A-Star and also the car project at the National University of Singapore. At the conference, there were demos of vehicles, including one from Singapore Technologies, which primarily does military contracting.

Things are moving fast there, and this week, the NUS team announced they will be doing a live public demo of their autonomous golf carts and they have made much progress. They will be running the carts over a course with 10 stops in the Singapore Chinese and Japanese Gardens. The public will be able to book rides online, and then come and summon and direct the vehicles with their phones. The vehicles will have a touch tablet where the steering wheel will go. Rides will be free. Earlier, they demonstrated not just detecting pedestrians but driving around them (if they stay still) but I don’t know if this project includes that.

This is not the first such public demo – the CityMobil2 demonstration in Sardinia ran in August, on a stretch of beachfront road blocked to cars but open to bicycles, service vehicles and pedestrians. This project slowed itself to unacceptably slow speeds and offered a linear route.

The Singapore project will also mix with pedestrians, but the area is closed to cars and bicycles. There will be two safety officers on bicycles riding behind the golf carts, able to shut them down if any problem presents, and speed will also be limited.”

Brad Templeton, Google driverless-division consultant, has written a new essay addressing urban density in a time of robocars. An excerpt:

“In today’s cities, there is a ‘downtown’ but there are many other neighbourhood centers, based around an interesting urban street. On that street are shops, restaurants and more, and it is pleasant and productive to walk around them. Houses near these streets are highly valued, and within a block of the cool street real estate values soar. Real estate ads all advertise these places as ‘steps from…’ the cool street. These local centers are space a mile or so apart in medium density urban spaces, a bit more in suburban areas. For those who live more than about 10 minutes, the cool street is more distant, and a destination for walks rather than the place you live.

When you have skyscraper density, as in downtowns and most of Manhattan, there is much greater density of retail streets, and everybody is close to neighbourhood activity and shopping. You just step out of your unit and take the elevator down to be right in the thick of things — a very walkable space. But most cities consist of lots of land with packed single family homes and townhomes, or apartment blocks 2-3 stories high.

The robocar might create something akin to a ‘neighbourhood elevator.’ Imagine a house 3/4 of a mile from the local cool street. In the house is a button. You might press the button and go out. Not that long after you get to the curb, a small robocar pulls up. This is a simple, low-speed model that only goes 30mph. It doesn’t have seatbelts, and is tall and not very aerodynamic. You might just stand in it, rather than sit. You get in and it starts heading towards your neighbourhood center. If you like, you tell it a more specific destination along the street and it takes you there.”

From a blog post by Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, about the company’s recent wheel-less and brake-less autonomous prototype, which has been surprisingly mocked by some:

“I was not involved in the specifics of design of this vehicle, though I pushed hard as I could for something in this direction. Here’s why I think it’s the right decision.

First of all, this is a prototype. Only 100 of this design will be made, and there will be more iterations. Google is all about studying, learning and doing it again, and they can afford to. They want to know what people think of this, but are not scared if they underestimate it at first.

Secondly, this is what is known as a ‘Disruptive Technology.’ Disruptive technologies, as described in the Silicon Valley bible The Innovators Dilemma are technologies that seem crazy and inferior at first. They meet a new need, not well understood by the incumbent big companies. Those big companies don’t see it as a threat — until years later, they are closing their doors. Every time a disruptive technology takes over, very few of the established players make it through to the other side. This does not guarantee that Google will dominate or crush those companies, or that everything that looks silly eventually wins. But it is a well established pattern.

This vehicle does not look threatening — not to people on the street, and not to existing car companies and pundits who don’t get it. Oh, there are many people inside those car companies who do get it, but the companies are incapable of getting it in their bones. Even when their CEOs get it, they can’t steer the company 90 degrees — there are too many entrenched forces in any large company. The rare exception are founder-led companies (like Google and Facebook and formerly Apple and Microsoft) where if the founder gets it, he or she can force the company to get it.

Even large companies who read this blog post and understand it still won’t get it, not most of the time. I’ve talked to executives from big car companies. They have a century of being car companies, and knowing what the means. Google, Tesla and the coming upstarts don’t.

One reason I will eventually move away from my chosen name for the technology — robocar — along with the other popular names like ‘self-driving car’ is that this future vehicle is not a car, not as we know it today. It is no more a ‘driverless car’ than a modern automobile is a horseless carriage. 100 years ago, the only way they could think of the car was to notice that there was no horse. Today, all many people notice about robocars is that no human is driving. This is the thing that comes after the car.”

Brad Templeton, who is a consultant to Google on its development of driverless cars thinks that thought-experiment the Trolley Problem being applied to robocars has more value as a philosophical exercise than in practical application. While these ethical quandaries certainly do exist, computer-aided driving will be much safer and the net result will be far fewer accidents and fatalities. From his post:

“Often this is mapped into the robocar world by considering a car which is forced to run over somebody, and has to choose who to run over. Choices suggested include deciding between:

• One person and two
• A child and an adult
• A person and a dog
• A person without right-of-way vs others who have it
• A deer vs. adding risk by swerving around it into the oncoming lane
• The occupant or owner of the car vs. a bystander on the street
• The destruction of an empty car vs. injury to a person who should not be on the road, but is.

I don’t want to pretend that this isn’t an interesting moral area, and it will indeed affect the law, liability and public perception. And at some point, programmers will evaluate these scenarios in their efforts. What I reject is the suggestion that this is high on the list of important issues and questions. I think it’s high on the list of questions that are interesting for philosophical debate, but that’s not the same as reality.

In reality, such choices are extremely rare. How often have you had to make such a decision, or heard of somebody making one? Ideal handling of such situations is difficult to decide, but there are many other issues to decide as well.

Secondly, in the rare situations where a human encounters such a moral dilemma, that person does not sit there and have an inner philosophical dialog on which is the most moral choice. Rather, they will go with a quick gut reaction, which is based on their character and their past thinking on such situations.”

From “Robocars and the Speed Limit,” Brad Templeton’s essay about why he thinks we should allow autonomous vehicles to speed:

“The limit is a number, but it is not especially magic. It’s not like one is safe at 65mph and reckless at 66mph, even though that’s how the law is written. Rather the risk from accidents increases gradually with speed. The risk of having an accident is harder to measure, but the severity of an accident is related to the square of the speed of impact.

There is a speed at which we may judge the accident risk is above acceptable limits. This speed is not a single number. It varies from driver to driver, and from car to car. It varies from hour to hour, from weather condition to weather condition and from road to road. As the Autobahn’s lower accident rate shows, some drivers are safer at very high speeds on well designed roads than other drivers are at 50mph on lesser roads.

And while the Germans are content to do it, the USA is not prepared to officially let drivers decide what the right speed for acceptable safety is. Rather it is done unofficially and irregularly.

How does a robocar enter this world? There are two common schools of thought:

1. As with its ancestor, the cruise control, the operator of a robocar can set the car to operate at any speed within its general limits, regardless of the road speed limit. The moral and safety decisions rest with this person.
2. The vehicle must be programmed to not break the speed limit, nor allow its operator to do so. It must be aware of all limits and obey them.

I believe the first choice is both better and more likely.”

Do we want the future to be seamless or jarring, at least initially? From Brad Templeton’s Robocars post about Vislab’s driverless car, which relies mostly on cameras:

“The Vislab car uses a LIDAR for forward obstacle detection, but their main thrust is the use of cameras. An FPGA-based stereo system is able to build point clouds from the two cameras. Driving appears to have been done in noonday sunlight. (This is easy in terms of seeing things but hard in terms of the harsh shadows.)

The article puts a focus on how the cameras are cheaper and less obtrusive. I continue to believe that is not particularly interesting — lasers will get cheaper and smaller, and what people want here is the best technology in the early adopter stages, not the cheapest. In addition, they will want it to look unusual. Cheaper and hidden are good goals once the cars have been deployed for 5-10 years.”

The emotional cost of robocar accidents will probably be high, much in the same way that airplane crashes, seldom though they occur, cause panic and terror while run-of-the-mill lethal car accidents are accepted as normal. That’s because airplanes (and driverless cars, eventually) are beyond our control. Such accidents don’t happen because of us, but to us. It’s something we have to constantly arrange and rearrange in our minds.

But beyond the emotional questions, who (or what) will actually be legally liable when automatic autos collide? From Brad Templeton’s answer to that question:

“People often ask who would get sued in a robocar accident. They wonder if it will be the occupant/passenger/driver, or the car company, or perhaps the software developer or some component maker. They are concerned that this is the major ‘blocking’ issue to resolve before cars can operate on the road.

The real answer, at least in the USA and many other countries, is that in the early years, everybody will get sued. There will be no shortage of lawyers out to make a reputation on an early case here, and several defendants in every case. It’s also quite probable that it will be the occupant of a robocar suing the makers of the car, with no 3rd party involved.

One thing that’s very likely to be new about a robocar accident is that the car will have made detailed sensor recordings of the event. That means a 360 degree 3-D view of everything, as well as some video. That means the ability to play back the accident from any viewpoint, and to even look inside the software and see what it was doing. Robocar developers all want these logs, at least during the long development and improvement cycle. Eventually owners of robocars should be able to turn off logging, but that will take some time, and the first accidents will be exquisitely logged.

This means that there will be little difficulty figuring out which parties in the accident violated the vehicle code and/or were responsible in the traditional sense for the accident. Right away, we’ll know who was where they should not have been, and as such, unlike regular accidents, there will be no argument on these points.

If it turns out that the robocar was in the wrong, it is likely that the combination of parties associated with the car, in association with their insurers, will immediately offer a very reasonable settlement. If they are doing their job and reducing accidents, and meeting their projections for how much they are reducing them, the cost of such settlements will have been factored into the insured risk projections, and payment for this reduced number of accidents will be done as it always is by insurers, or possibly a self-insured equivalent.

That’s why the question of ‘who is liable?’ is much less important than people imagine.”

The opening of “The Rise of the Small and Narrow Vehicle,” Brad Templeton’s blog post about how car design will be transformed when (if) we eventually live in a world of driverless, automated taxis:

“Many of the more interesting consequences of a robotic taxi ‘mobility on demand’ service is the ability to open up all sorts of new areas of car design. When you are just summoning a vehicle for one trip, you can be sent a vehicle that is well matched to that trip. Today we almost all drive in 5 passenger sedans or larger, whether we are alone, with a single passenger or in a group. Many always travel in an SUV or Minivan on trips that have no need of that.

The ability to use small, light vehicles means the ability to make transportation much more efficient. While electric cars are a good start (at least in places without coal-based electricity) the reality is today’s electric cars are still sedans and in fact are heavy due to their batteries. As such they use 250 to 350 watt-hours/mile. That’s good, but not great. At the national grid average, 300 wh/mile is around 3000 BTUs/mile or the equivalent of 37mpg. Good, and cleaner if from natural gas, but we can do a lot more.

Half-width vehicles have another benefit — they don’t take up much room on the road, or in parking/waiting. Two half-width vehicles that find one another on the road can pair up to take only one lane space. A road that’s heavy with half-width vehicles (as many are in the developing world) can handle a lot more traffic. Rich folks don’t tend to buy these vehicles, but they would accept one as a taxi if they are alone. Indeed, a half-width face-to-face vehicle should be very nice for 2 people.”

Brad Templeton considers a potential use for the coming robotic autos: “whistlecars,” which can deliver themselves to you for a small fee whenever you need to drive someplace. It’s the taxi without the taxi driver, and the vehicle can return itself. An excerpt:

“Many of the big changes that will come about form robocars will come from how they free car designers from the constraints of human-driven cars which are the owner’s sole, or almost-sole vehicle.

Much of this depends on this yet-untested idea:

• If one can hire a cheap specialized ‘robotaxi’ (or whistlecar) on demand when one has a special automotive need, car users can elect to purchase a vehicle only for their most common needs, rather than trying to meet almost all of them — or to not purchase at all.

For example, for many, most trips are short, single passenger and do not require significant cargo room. Almost nobody purchases a vehicle good only for that purpose, because they want to cover the occasional needs for long trips, taking extra people, carrying cargo, towing or going off-road.

Some of these changes would also apply to what I’m calling ‘whistlecars’ — owned or rented cars that deliver themselves to you when you summon them, but which you still drive.” (Thanks Atlantic.)

The recent book Aerotropolis argues that high-speed rail will increase, not decrease, air traffic. More people will simply use the trains to reach airports. A similar argument from Brad Templeton’s new Singularity Hub article about high-speed rail and driverless cars:

“The air travel industry is not going to sit still. The airlines aren’t going to just let their huge business on the California air corridor disappear to the trains the way the HSR authority hopes. These are private companies, and they will cut prices, and innovate to compete. They will find better solutions to the security nightmare that has taken away their edge, and they’ll produce innovative products we have yet to see. The reality is that good security is possible without requiring people arrive at airports an hour before departure, if we are driven to make it happen. And the trains may not remain immune from the same security needs forever.

On the green front, we already see Boeing’s new generation of carbon fiber planes operating with less fuel. New turboprops are quiet and much more efficient, and there is more to come.

The fast trains and self-driving cars will help the airports. Instead of HSR from downtown SF to downtown LA, why not take that same HSR just to the airport, and clear security while on the train to be dropped off close to the gate. Or imagine a self-driving car that picks you up on the tarmac as you walk off the plane and whisks you directly to your destination. Driven by competition, the airlines will find a way to take advantage of their huge speed advantage in the core part of the journey.”