November 8, 2013 • 32 mins
What was the DARPA Grand Challenge? When did Google begin working on autonomous cars? Are robots better drivers than humans?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking.
The podcast said looks at the future and says, you
might think I'm delirious the way I run you down.
(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren voc and I'm Joe McCormick.
And we're revisiting a topic we've covered in a previous
couple of episodes, affard thinking. We're revisiting autonomous cars. Self
driving cars, Yeah, because we we had had two whole
episodes about them. We recommend listening to them there in
our audio archives. But but there are a lot of
(00:41):
other things that we still wanted to talk about, and
also some interesting new information that has arisen. Yeah, And
part of that was just kind of talking about the
history of self driving cars and developing them, because we
didn't really talk about in those previous episodes. And you know,
there was some work that was done as early as
the nineteen seventies in trying to create self driving or
autonomy as cars, and some of that technology has made
(01:02):
its way into vehicles. Things like cruise control is a
very simple manifestation, but we also have things like collision detection,
parking assistance, all this other kind of technology that has
been incorporated into various models of cars over the last
few years. And we're seeing, you know, year over year,
cars are getting more and more of these autonomous features
built into them. We haven't quite reached the point where
(01:24):
you can go and buy a truly autonomous car off
the lot and have it drive you home. But we're
getting there. Uh, the question is how fast are we
going to get there? But we'll kind of address that
a little bit later. To look at the true kind
of history of the modern self driving car, you gotta
look at UM a mysterious organization and part of the
(01:46):
Department of Defense. Yeah, so, uh, Department of Defense. Yeah,
United States Department of Defense has the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency or DARPA. DARPA is actually responsible for a
lot of technology that we use today. So they're building transformers.
Is that it? Actually here's the funny thing. Here's the
(02:07):
funny thing. They are working on humanoid robots right now.
That's the latest challenge. But the the challenges we're talking
about our autonomous cars that were called robots, but don't
transform into humanoid robots. They are not in disguise. They're
just robots in car form. So so they're like half
of a transformer, Yes, the transformer, the boring half, and
(02:29):
and a lot of this is hypothetically for say, disaster
relief work, stuff like that, um military purposes. Specifically, it
says they like they like talking about the disaster relief
for ye. Well that's the that's the cheery way of
putting it. Yeah, because they The specific mission of DARPA,
according to the website is darpast mission is to maintain
the technological superiority of the U. S Military and prevent
(02:51):
technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary,
high payoff research, bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and
their military use. Not quite as fuzzy and warm as
they We want to to improve disaster relief response. But
I mean it's honest. So, but darp has been been
responsible for technology that has given us the opportunity to
(03:15):
have a job because it was DARPA that funded the
ARPA net, which is the predecessor to the Internet. So
do you guys know when, uh, when DARPA got started,
Like what what event precipitated the founding of DARPA. Can
you can you take a wild guess of what event
in history would have inspired the United States to launch
(03:36):
a research and development organization to try and maintain technological superiority.
I'm gonna say either, um, either sput Nick or when
they canceled Happy Days. You were right the first times Sputnik. Uh.
Sput Nick was in fact the event that inspired the
United States to form DARPA. So, of course, Sputnik was
(03:58):
when the Soviet Union launched a saddle that orbited the
Earth and went beep a few times. Terrifying. Yeah, No,
Sputnik two is what was terrifying, because that had the
dog in it, like poor La who suffocated pretty quickly
in that because it failures in the Sputnik two. So darnia. Yeah,
getting back to the cheerfulness, DARPA ended up funding lots
(04:20):
of different projects, including what would become the Internet, or
at least the predecessor to the Internet, I should be clear.
And then also in two thousand four decided to get
into the automated car business. In a way, they actually
submitted a challenge to the world, or really I should
say to the United States. Um, And they said that
(04:40):
the purpose of the DARPA Grand Challenge two thousand four,
which was the first year they held. It is to
leverage American ingenuity to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle
technologies that can be applied to military requirements. UH, So
we always get a military bit at the end. So UH.
In that challenge, they had I think twenty five groups. Uh.
(05:01):
And the challenge specifically involved a route from Los Angeles
to Las Vegas, which is three hundred miles. Is a
three hundred mile course that these cars were expected to
UH to go on, and it included both on road
and off road sections. They had cleared the on road
sections of traffic so these robotic cars wouldn't be careening
into pedestrians and and and regular traffic. It wasn't onlike
(05:25):
Hollywood Boulevard or anything like that. The best probably yeah, no,
I've been on Hollywood Boulevard. That is for the best.
A series of way points to find the routes, and
the vehicles were to follow those way points, and there
were also some checkpoints where the teams were allowed to
stand by in order to do quick repairs or refuel
their vehicles before the vehicle would continue on. However, every
(05:49):
single vehicle had to be unmanned and autonomous, which meant
you could not control it by remote control. It had
to be moving on its own and the winning team
would be the first one or the one to navigate
that route in the shortest amount of time and they
would win one million dollars. So among those twenty five
teams were some racing teams UH. There was also cal
(06:09):
Tech and Virginia Tech were in there. There was even
a high school team, the Palos Verdes High School Racing Team,
and other teams involved robot enthusiasts and other companies and
research facilities. So who won nobody none. None of the
vehicles were able to to go across that three hundred
(06:32):
mile routes successfully within the timeframe. So then they held
another Grand Challenge in two thousand five. It was a
little more um conservative, I would say. Instead of three
hundred miles, it was a hundred thirty one point two
miles long and UH it was so that made it
less than half as long as the two thousand four challenge. UM.
(06:54):
They had five teams completed UH and Stanford went away
with the first prize, winning two million dollars. Some of
the other teams included a couple of teams from Carnegie
Melon and a team from Princeton UH, but the Stanford
team completed the challenge in six hours fifty three minutes. UH.
Their car relied on lasers, optical cameras, and radar for
(07:15):
environmental perception, and the data gathered by sensors was mapped
against a drive ability map that was used to set
the direction and speed of the vehicle. And all the
technical papers for all the teams, all of that is
available on an archive site at DARPA will try and
link that in social so that you guys can see
Because you can actually go and read their technical papers
and see their approach to building an autonomous vehicle. It's
(07:38):
really fascinating stuff, um, particularly if you're an engineer and
you can understand all the terms. Even for me, where
I could understand maybe twenty of them, I was really
I was really excited to read them. And then you
finally had the Urban Challenge, which was in two thousand seven.
So the Urban challenge was stepping up the difficulty from
the two thousand five challenge. It wasn't as long, but
(07:59):
it was in an urban environment, meaning they were going
to create traffic patterns. They had people driving actual cars
driving around to to make that more like an actual
town setting. Uh. They used an old uh no longer
in use Air Force base to create their little fake
town and and have the three various courses. They had
(08:20):
a national qualifying event. Uh. There were I think eighty
nine teams that had applied to be part of this.
Thirty five were selected to participate in the National Qualifying Event,
which took place over eight days, had three test areas.
One course was one where vehicles had to merge into
and out of two way traffic in a circulating course.
And out of all the test days, only one vehicle
(08:42):
was ever struck by a robotic car. And in my
notes I said for getting fresh, So apparently a robot
car just Actually, there's some funny stories from this, I'll
tell you in a second. The second course tested cars
ability to stay within a lane on a meandering road.
So if the road has lots of turns and curves
in it, can the car actually maintain the right lane? Uh,
(09:03):
in order for it to not very into oncoming traffic?
Well ideally yes. Yeah, we'll have a lot more to
say about that in a minute too. They also had
to go through a a narrow street where they had
parallel parked cars on either side of the street, and
that section was called the Gauntlet, And the last part
of that test was the robot had to locate and
(09:24):
park in an assigned parking space and then pull back
out and move on to the third course, which was
a series of four way intersections that the robot had
to negotiate, so the rolways had to detect traffic and
obey the rules of the road. So you know, when
you come up to a four way stop, who gets
to go through first? It all depends upon when you
arrived at the four way stop and your position in
relation to the other drivers. And also they put in
(09:46):
roadblocks on the course and the robots had to identify
the roadblock, make a U turn, and then plan some
different Yeah. Yeah, it had to still get to its
to its end location. Um. And what was interesting was
that eleven teams went on to the final challenge. That
challenge required the robots to visit specific checkpoints and the
teams were not notified of the checkpoint locations until five
(10:08):
minutes before the launch, so they had a map of
the entire space, like they knew what the digital file
that had all the map of the fake town, but
they didn't know where the checkpoints we're going to be
on that map until five minutes before they were pulling
out the star the route and exactly they had to
do it right there in real time. The course also
(10:30):
had thirty vehicles with drivers moving through the course during
the test, so you had real live drivers on the
course at the same time, and about half the vehicles
were removed from the course for various errors. And here's
the fun part. One of the errors was the Terra
Max vehicle that nearly drove into the old Commissary building
on the Air Force space, so they were able to
stop it just before it drove into a building. Um.
(10:53):
And also the team you you see f car spontaneously
decided to park at a car port and just take
a break, just pulled into a car poard and stopped,
just like y'all, I give up, I am done with
this test. They eventually disqualified it. Cornell and uh Cornell
and M I. T S vehicles gently bumped into each other.
(11:13):
I like to say they were trading paint. They were
trying to share a lane together, but they were allowed
to continue the course once they were separated and totally
given a little time out. UH. And then first place
on that went to a team called Tartan Racing out
of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the second place went to Stanford again. UH.
First prize was two million dollars again. So ultimately six
(11:35):
teams finished the challenge that year, which showed that even
though they wrapped up the difficulty, they still had six
teams from across the United States complete that course, which
really showed the development of technology in the span of
two years, because we remember in two thousand four no
one finished, well three years really, because it was two
thousand seven when they did Urban Challenge, right, And of
course at this point in two thousand seven, many cars,
(11:57):
if not most cars, had on board computers. We're controlling
a lot of different systems. It was mostly monitoring, but yeah,
there was some control as well. But of course after
these challenges, some tech companies a little curious. Are you
talking about a company that rhymes with schmoogle? Um? I
(12:18):
might be Okay, I remember when this news broke because
I have a friend who works at Google who told
me that he didn't tell me about the car. He
just told me. It's like there's something that's so cool
going on at Google, and I can't wait for it
to become public because you're gonna flip out. And it
took about half a year before the news became public
from when he told me, and sure enough I flipped out.
(12:40):
They actually recruited from the challenges they did. In fact,
the guy who is the project leader UM is in
fact a one of the members of the Stanford team
that won Sebastian. He won that two thousand and five challenge,
so he was part of the the winning team back then.
And uh, and there are a few others who also
(13:01):
are working with Google that participated in the Grand Challenge,
and other people who participated in the Grand Challenge are
working for specific car companies, so not just Google. Google
was not the only one to pull talent from this group.
There are other car companies that that did as well, right,
But so Google got to work um decking out some
(13:22):
other proprietary vehicles. They weren't creating their own car from scratch.
That's one thing to make clear. Yeah, the first one
that I remember being released to the public, or the
information that's released to the public, was a Toyota Prius actually,
but they also they've used Lexus, Yes they have, which
is also a Toyota company. Yeah, but so they in
two thousand and ten, I believe it was, they went
(13:43):
public with r Yeah, they have been working on it
for like a year, but that was when we found
out about it. Yeah, there was a big Google blog
post where they announced that, look, you know where there
are all these traffic accidents, um cars, they're not driving efficiently,
and people are spending way too much time behind the wheel.
We can solve all three of these problems at once
(14:06):
if we create self driving cars, right, just take people
out of the equation and everything goes better because removing
quote the loose nut between the gas pedal and the
steering wheel. That's my favorite. That's my favorite joke. Mechanics. Yeah,
as as we talked about in the previous episodes, the
National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration estimates that more than
(14:26):
road crashes are due to human error. Yeah, I've seen
I've seen figures everywhere between that that's huge. Like if
you could remove that then you would significantly decrease the
number of injuries and deaths, perhaps terribly upset the car
insurance industry, but which you know, that's okay. Uh. You
(14:48):
also have efficiency to consider. Machine drivers are going to
be way more efficient than human drivers because they have
like established rules that govern when they gas and break,
especially once you set up a network of these things
and these at times cars start working together to clear
out traffic exactly. Yeah. In two thousand twelve UM and
(15:09):
I Trip Police study, they they estimated that they think
a highway filled entirely with autonomous cars instead of with
human driven cars, can increase the capacity of that highway
five times. Um. Yeah. Now, now we just have to
get to the point where we don't need jobs anymore,
(15:30):
and then we'll just stay at home in our cars
will drive everywhere for us for no reason. Perfect. Uh. Yeah,
you know what's interesting to me? Do you know what
they You know what the Google car uses as a
primary sensor, right? Is it light ar? Yeah? Have you
heard about this? Okay, So imagine the lasers l sixty
four lasers. That's not radar for detecting lies, Um, L
(15:52):
I D A R. Yes, it's it's sixty four lasers
all right. So imagine that you've got a pack of
sixty four lasers and a turret top of a car,
and that tour. It rotates at six centered revolutions per minute.
And what's doing is it's just constantly scanning its environment
so that it can detect minute changes as as it's
traveling through a space, so it knows not only what
(16:15):
stationary objects are nearby, it can track when things are
moving and then be able to plot against that. UM. Now, granted,
I think I think in every case that I've read,
Google only allows people who are using these cars to
operate them on highways. Once they pull off onto surface streets,
it has to go under manual control by Google's policy. UM.
(16:38):
And of course these are not cars that are allowed
outside of the realms of Google. But that is changing. Yeah,
I mean, what's what's interesting is that, you know, it
was two thousand ten when Google unveiled this, and there
weren't really any laws on the books that would allow
for autonomous cars. In fact, most of the laws in
the world specify that you have to have a driver
(17:02):
behind the wheel in control of the vehicle at all times.
But actually that is now changing, and in a few
places in the United States it's already changed. Right in California, Nevada,
and Florida, there have been laws passed that specifically allow
for the testing of autonomous cars. Nevada was the first
in in two thousand eleven, they passed Assembly Buill number
five eleven, And what that basically did was it allowed
(17:26):
the state Department of Transportation to revise their laws to
accommodate for autonomous cars. Now, in this case, there's still
has to be a driver behind the wheel, but the
driver does not have to be in control of the
vehicle at all times. Yeah. Um. And so Nevada actually
followed through with that and in two thousand twelve they
officially approved a license for autonomous cars. Yes, I saw
(17:48):
that May of two thousand twelve. I know that Florida,
Florida being one of the other states that allowed for
autonomous car testing. This is I honestly don't know the
reasoning behind this. I'm just gonna throw it out there
and see if you guys think it's realistic. Do you
think that it's possibly because of the aged population in
Florida that this was something that Florida was interested in. Well,
(18:10):
I don't know, but I mean I've read that a
lot of the reasoning behind autonomous cars is giving more
mobility to people, say who like don't see as well
as they used to, um, but would still like to
be able to have some independent movement around the city.
I would guess that that Disney might have something to
say about that as well. Automos cars are legal in
(18:31):
California and Florida. Those are the two places where Disney
parks are in the United States. So um, Google is
also in California. So collusion is a little is a little,
a little on the flimsy side. Uh. So that's where
it is so far. I believe d C also, I
think has been working on this, but now um, there
are a bunch of states that are starting to considering it. Yeah,
(18:52):
and the federal government is kind of saying you know,
of course, in the United States, for those who are
not in the United States, we have state governments and
we have the federal government. The federal government has been
on record as saying, guys, you might want to slow
down a little bit before you start passing all this
legislation on the state by state basis, simply because we
don't have enough data here to be able to legislate responsibly.
(19:15):
Whereas the technology companies are saying, look, all the data
that's coming back is showing that this is way safer
than the alternative. So right, a report published by the
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which which is a nonprofit
although it is funded by the American auto industry um
and said that collision warning and breaking systems are already
(19:35):
helping drivers avoid accidents. Um that that statistically, if you
were drive, if you are in a car that has
these systems, you are less likely to be in an accident. Yeah.
And also it's good to keep in mind that typically
these laws, uh, they sort of unveil these new motor
rights in different stages, so they're opened on private roads
before they are on public roads, right, Um. And I
(19:56):
guess that's to allow for testing. And and it's it's
not just Google Old that's getting into this game. Actually,
there are quite a few companies that are all investing
in their own automated car technology. Toyota is another one,
BMW four GM, Volvo, Audi, Mercedes, Benz, Nissan, Right, right, Toyota. Yeah,
(20:17):
all of these have at least in the testing stages
various forms of these things, and a lot of them
are saying that within the next ten years they're going
to be rolling out, if not fully automated cars at
least um auto assist cars with more, because again, this
may be one of those things where because of the
legislative barriers, there may be some time that we'll have
(20:37):
to wait to see automated cars being available for the
average consumer. I'm sure they'll be prohibitively expensive for most
people when they first when they first hit the roads
as well, But I think it's gonna be. I think
it's gonna be a few years just because of the
legislative side. But we will still benefit from that technology
in other ways, with more more advanced cry prevention systems,
(21:01):
parking assistance, that kind of stuff. Yeah, speaking to the price,
I believe right now an autonomous car is running about
a hundred and fifty thou dollars. Yea. I saw one
guy say that that there's always the possibility that before
we see fully autonomous cars rolling off the manufacturing plants
out of all these these companies, that we may see
(21:21):
aftermarket kits where you can convert a car over to
an autonomous vehicle. But even that would be in the
hundred dozen dollar range, so still not cheap. Sure, Yeah,
And you know the kinds of companies that are putting
out things that you can buy right now that are
partially autonomous are like Mercedes Benz, which has a radar
and stereoscopic cameras that will help you determine, you know,
(21:43):
help your car determine the speed of traffic around you
and also your position within a lane and keep you
there up to speeds of about eighteen miles per hour. Yeah,
and I think, uh GM, they've said that they're they're
going to have partially autonomous cadillacs by well, we'll see.
That's really close. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and partially autonomous. I
mean that's vague enough where you could argue that there
(22:05):
are cars on the market right now that have that
one of the upcoming systems and that I'm excited about.
And and another another sponsor plug, This one is from Toyota.
UM is a cooperative adaptive cruise control, part of which
uses transceivers to broadcast speed, acceleration, and breaking in between
different cars on the road, so that way you can
maintain the proper vehicle distance between you and the car
(22:27):
in front of you. That kind of thing, right with
something a little bit more interactive than just the the lasers.
The receptors that are that are figuring out what's going
on more than just an alarm or something on those lines. Yeah.
In fact, um M I T had a great little
post about some recent research that came out of the
(22:48):
Google experiments. A. Google has been running these these cars
for something like over three hundred thousand miles accumulatively. If
you had them all up together, it's like three miles
of travel time. They've had one accident, and according to
according to Google, that was done while the car was
under manual control, not under computer control. So I think
(23:09):
they also got rear ended ones. Yeah, but the when
they took the black box readings, because a lot of
what is going into these autonomous cars is also a
very intricate um recording system for everything that's going on
in the car. I mean, you know, they are in
the testing stages, so of course that data is very valuable. Um.
But it proved that the autonomous car breaked appropriately and
(23:33):
that the guy behind him that rear ended him was
not paying attention and just just just hit him because
because the car did exactly what was supposed to do. Yeah,
a lot of this research that's going on right now
is about how to manage the interface between humans and computers,
and you know where a human should take over, where
a computer should take over, what specialties both of these
operators can have. And some of the questions being posed
(23:56):
are about, you know, whether or not reckless driving behavior
is actually really important in some situations. You know, whether
or not a computer could handle a situation wherein you
kind of need to go over a line, or you
need to speed up or slow down at a at
a rate of speed that isn't otherwise advisable, or break
a traffic law. Now, it does seem that for the
most part, the uh, the autonomous cars are able to
(24:19):
respond much much faster than any human could, in a
more smooth transition than humans. However, that's that's based upon
a certain set of rules. Well, yeah, and and assuming
that everyone is in an autonomous car, that's fine. But
when you are the one person in an autonomous car
and you're driving in a town full of crazy people
(24:40):
like go on no Atlanta, then maybe that your car
is doing everything that's right, but you know, it may
still not save you from a crash. Of course, we
can't plan for everybody's behavior, obviously, you can only do
the best you can. One of the other interesting things
from that m I T post was that the data
shows that automated car spin time and what they called
(25:01):
near collision states, meaning that that that's how you usually drive.
I don't drive at all, so so that makes it easy.
Uh yeah, but ner if I were to drive, I'd
be in a constant near collision state. And some might
argue that Georgia is a near collision state, but the
you know, the the actual definition there is when you
are engaging in behaviors that are more likely to cause
(25:24):
the collision, things like accelerating too quickly, breaking too quickly,
following too close, following much too closely. In the automated cars,
because you set up these very specific rules for them
to follow, they have to follow those rules, so they
tend to operate within much safer parameters than your typical
driver would. Though also I've read if if you were
to imagine entirely automated highway, those cars can follow much
(25:48):
more closely, much more safely, if you were able if
everyone were automated, Like if if either of these we
have that infrastructure and all the cars are talking to
one another, then the theoretically you could do that and
also ours behind you know, larger vehicles would even benefit
from drafting at the point you're talking about saving a fuel,
But you know that's building out an infrastructure is is
(26:11):
really really hard, and uh, I think I think we'll
see automated cars before we see automated infrastructures on a
wide scale basis. Though, an interesting thing about the most
recent developments and automated cars is they might not depend
on that much infrastructure like we used to imagine that. Well,
(26:31):
in order to really have automated highways, you need like
you know, computers in the roads that control everything, right,
But we're creating fleets of automated cars today that do
you just find simply by reacting to each other, right,
and or through differential GPS systems so that they're paying
attention to to not only your position via satellite, but
(26:51):
via markers in the road. Right. Like I said, I think,
I think there are a couple of different barriers that
we have to get over for automated cars to become
a reality for the average consumer. The big one being legislative,
because I think it is going to take a lot
of work to get to a point where automated cars
have a legal designation that is recognized, not just within
(27:12):
a state, but between states and within between countries even
for them to be a viable form of transportation, I think.
I think the thing that's going to help with that
is is the parallel to all of this, where in
insurance companies are providing black boxes as an opt in
option for opt in option, that was a really great
turn of phrase for for for their drivers to potentially
(27:34):
get a lower rate on their car insurance. And not
many people, but maybe like about a third of people
I supposedly are signing up for these things, and so
they're starting to gather data on driving habits a lot more.
On top of that, the other barrier I would say
is we've seen this happen a lot in various networks,
right where you get a proprietary network where other networks
(27:56):
can't necessarily communicate with it. So, for example, we talked
about an automated house, and right now, you can do
a lot of automation at home. But the easiest way
of doing that is to buy all your stuff from
one source, because buying it from multiple sources means you
have to find some way of making them communicate with
each other. Sure, however, if you have for example, and
UM Apple TV and also an iPhone and also right,
(28:19):
if you're all within one ecosystem, you're great, but if
you're not. If you're if your ecosystem is not homogeneous,
then you're in trouble. Well, as we know, traffic is
not a homogeneous situation. People have all sorts of different
cars out there from different models, models and different makers.
So unless we were to have an agreed upon SEV
standards that all vehicles were using in order for their
(28:42):
UH information to communicate properly, then you have potentially a
fleet of cars that doesn't really communicate with each other
very well. That they need to all speak the same language.
And um, that's something that maybe has yet to be devised.
In fact, I think we talked in our previous podcast
about this about maybe the need for something like a
traffic protocol. Yeah, yes, yeah, And it's one of those
(29:04):
things where you you need either there needs to either
be a leader in the space and everyone ends up
following suit because they just they've defined it, or there
needs to be some sort of regulation. Yeah. Like like
and where did i P camp come from? Oh, well,
that came out of our bonette, So that was like
a public initiative that created the protocol that all of
the private organizations would end up using. Right, so you
(29:25):
could get it some form of independent entity like maybe
even the I E. Being able to come up and
you know, a group of engineers that come up with
a A a standard language that would be used. But
I mean, all of this is jumping way ahead. We
still aren't entirely sure when we'll see these cars um
become something that we could actually purchase. To mention i E. Again,
(29:48):
they predicted it also last year that in their view,
by of cars on the road will be autonomous. That'll
be how that's a that's bold. I would love that
future so much. Just I'm imagining how traffic would become
such uh so much more smooth. Studies showed the young
(30:12):
people like this idea. It's more popular more. I'm liking
it even more now. Uh well, young young people are
certainly the ones who are most likely to pick up
these black boxes from their insurance companies. So I so
I guess that would that would make perfect sense. Yeah,
But I mean I think I like it the most
because I don't drive, So for me having something like
(30:35):
this where maybe I do, you know, drive occasionally, but
I have a vehicle that does most of my driving
for me would give me uh even more freedom, or
more importantly, would mean my wife is no longer my chauffeur.
Oh sure, And as we talked about in that previous episode,
it would certainly open doors to people who are who
are unable to drive for various physical health sure yeah
(30:58):
or not health. But I remember I do. I did
read one thing from uh M I T Professor John Leonard,
who has worked on navigation systems for autonomous cars, who
said he doesn't believe we'll see a totally autonomous taxi
service within his lifetime. He doesn't think that's ever going
to happen while he's still uh, you know, walking treading
the earth so uh, and he's he's working on the problem.
(31:22):
And it's not again, it's not just a technological thing.
It's also a social thing. And that was kind of
what he was pointing out, that that taxi drivers um
provide an important role in society, particularly if they are
efficient and nice. Uh. He was talking about this about Manhattan,
but said, really, I mean more of the European style
(31:42):
taxi drivers. I was about to say, alright, so I
think I think we're good on self driving cars for
the near future. Of course, I say that probably tomorrow
there'll be some breaking news they'll necessitate us to do
a whole new podcast. But that's okay because I love
this topic. So guys, make sure you go to FW
thinking dot com. That is our homepage where you can
find the blog posts, podcasts, videos, articles, all sorts of
(32:06):
cool information about the future. Go check that out, and
also look for us on Facebook and Twitter with the
handle f W Thinking and we will talk to you
again really soon. For more on this topic in the
future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com brought to
(32:35):
you by Toyota. Let's go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking.
The podcast said looks at the future and says, you
might think I'm delirious the way I run you down.
(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren voc and I'm Joe McCormick.
And we're revisiting a topic we've covered in a previous
couple of episodes, affard thinking. We're revisiting autonomous cars. Self
driving cars, Yeah, because we we had had two whole
episodes about them. We recommend listening to them there in
our audio archives. But but there are a lot of
(00:41):
other things that we still wanted to talk about, and
also some interesting new information that has arisen. Yeah, And
part of that was just kind of talking about the
history of self driving cars and developing them, because we
didn't really talk about in those previous episodes. And you know,
there was some work that was done as early as
the nineteen seventies in trying to create self driving or
autonomy as cars, and some of that technology has made
(01:02):
its way into vehicles. Things like cruise control is a
very simple manifestation, but we also have things like collision detection,
parking assistance, all this other kind of technology that has
been incorporated into various models of cars over the last
few years. And we're seeing, you know, year over year,
cars are getting more and more of these autonomous features
built into them. We haven't quite reached the point where
(01:24):
you can go and buy a truly autonomous car off
the lot and have it drive you home. But we're
getting there. Uh, the question is how fast are we
going to get there? But we'll kind of address that
a little bit later. To look at the true kind
of history of the modern self driving car, you gotta
look at UM a mysterious organization and part of the
(01:46):
Department of Defense. Yeah, so, uh, Department of Defense. Yeah,
United States Department of Defense has the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency or DARPA. DARPA is actually responsible for a
lot of technology that we use today. So they're building transformers.
Is that it? Actually here's the funny thing. Here's the
(02:07):
funny thing. They are working on humanoid robots right now.
That's the latest challenge. But the the challenges we're talking
about our autonomous cars that were called robots, but don't
transform into humanoid robots. They are not in disguise. They're
just robots in car form. So so they're like half
of a transformer, Yes, the transformer, the boring half, and
(02:29):
and a lot of this is hypothetically for say, disaster
relief work, stuff like that, um military purposes. Specifically, it
says they like they like talking about the disaster relief
for ye. Well that's the that's the cheery way of
putting it. Yeah, because they The specific mission of DARPA,
according to the website is darpast mission is to maintain
the technological superiority of the U. S Military and prevent
(02:51):
technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary,
high payoff research, bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and
their military use. Not quite as fuzzy and warm as
they We want to to improve disaster relief response. But
I mean it's honest. So, but darp has been been
responsible for technology that has given us the opportunity to
(03:15):
have a job because it was DARPA that funded the
ARPA net, which is the predecessor to the Internet. So
do you guys know when, uh, when DARPA got started,
Like what what event precipitated the founding of DARPA. Can
you can you take a wild guess of what event
in history would have inspired the United States to launch
(03:36):
a research and development organization to try and maintain technological superiority.
I'm gonna say either, um, either sput Nick or when
they canceled Happy Days. You were right the first times Sputnik. Uh.
Sput Nick was in fact the event that inspired the
United States to form DARPA. So, of course, Sputnik was
(03:58):
when the Soviet Union launched a saddle that orbited the
Earth and went beep a few times. Terrifying. Yeah, No,
Sputnik two is what was terrifying, because that had the
dog in it, like poor La who suffocated pretty quickly
in that because it failures in the Sputnik two. So darnia. Yeah,
getting back to the cheerfulness, DARPA ended up funding lots
(04:20):
of different projects, including what would become the Internet, or
at least the predecessor to the Internet, I should be clear.
And then also in two thousand four decided to get
into the automated car business. In a way, they actually
submitted a challenge to the world, or really I should
say to the United States. Um, And they said that
(04:40):
the purpose of the DARPA Grand Challenge two thousand four,
which was the first year they held. It is to
leverage American ingenuity to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle
technologies that can be applied to military requirements. UH, So
we always get a military bit at the end. So UH.
In that challenge, they had I think twenty five groups. Uh.
(05:01):
And the challenge specifically involved a route from Los Angeles
to Las Vegas, which is three hundred miles. Is a
three hundred mile course that these cars were expected to
UH to go on, and it included both on road
and off road sections. They had cleared the on road
sections of traffic so these robotic cars wouldn't be careening
into pedestrians and and and regular traffic. It wasn't onlike
(05:25):
Hollywood Boulevard or anything like that. The best probably yeah, no,
I've been on Hollywood Boulevard. That is for the best.
A series of way points to find the routes, and
the vehicles were to follow those way points, and there
were also some checkpoints where the teams were allowed to
stand by in order to do quick repairs or refuel
their vehicles before the vehicle would continue on. However, every
(05:49):
single vehicle had to be unmanned and autonomous, which meant
you could not control it by remote control. It had
to be moving on its own and the winning team
would be the first one or the one to navigate
that route in the shortest amount of time and they
would win one million dollars. So among those twenty five
teams were some racing teams UH. There was also cal
(06:09):
Tech and Virginia Tech were in there. There was even
a high school team, the Palos Verdes High School Racing Team,
and other teams involved robot enthusiasts and other companies and
research facilities. So who won nobody none. None of the
vehicles were able to to go across that three hundred
(06:32):
mile routes successfully within the timeframe. So then they held
another Grand Challenge in two thousand five. It was a
little more um conservative, I would say. Instead of three
hundred miles, it was a hundred thirty one point two
miles long and UH it was so that made it
less than half as long as the two thousand four challenge. UM.
(06:54):
They had five teams completed UH and Stanford went away
with the first prize, winning two million dollars. Some of
the other teams included a couple of teams from Carnegie
Melon and a team from Princeton UH, but the Stanford
team completed the challenge in six hours fifty three minutes. UH.
Their car relied on lasers, optical cameras, and radar for
(07:15):
environmental perception, and the data gathered by sensors was mapped
against a drive ability map that was used to set
the direction and speed of the vehicle. And all the
technical papers for all the teams, all of that is
available on an archive site at DARPA will try and
link that in social so that you guys can see
Because you can actually go and read their technical papers
and see their approach to building an autonomous vehicle. It's
(07:38):
really fascinating stuff, um, particularly if you're an engineer and
you can understand all the terms. Even for me, where
I could understand maybe twenty of them, I was really
I was really excited to read them. And then you
finally had the Urban Challenge, which was in two thousand seven.
So the Urban challenge was stepping up the difficulty from
the two thousand five challenge. It wasn't as long, but
(07:59):
it was in an urban environment, meaning they were going
to create traffic patterns. They had people driving actual cars
driving around to to make that more like an actual
town setting. Uh. They used an old uh no longer
in use Air Force base to create their little fake
town and and have the three various courses. They had
(08:20):
a national qualifying event. Uh. There were I think eighty
nine teams that had applied to be part of this.
Thirty five were selected to participate in the National Qualifying Event,
which took place over eight days, had three test areas.
One course was one where vehicles had to merge into
and out of two way traffic in a circulating course.
And out of all the test days, only one vehicle
(08:42):
was ever struck by a robotic car. And in my
notes I said for getting fresh, So apparently a robot
car just Actually, there's some funny stories from this, I'll
tell you in a second. The second course tested cars
ability to stay within a lane on a meandering road.
So if the road has lots of turns and curves
in it, can the car actually maintain the right lane? Uh,
(09:03):
in order for it to not very into oncoming traffic?
Well ideally yes. Yeah, we'll have a lot more to
say about that in a minute too. They also had
to go through a a narrow street where they had
parallel parked cars on either side of the street, and
that section was called the Gauntlet, And the last part
of that test was the robot had to locate and
(09:24):
park in an assigned parking space and then pull back
out and move on to the third course, which was
a series of four way intersections that the robot had
to negotiate, so the rolways had to detect traffic and
obey the rules of the road. So you know, when
you come up to a four way stop, who gets
to go through first? It all depends upon when you
arrived at the four way stop and your position in
relation to the other drivers. And also they put in
(09:46):
roadblocks on the course and the robots had to identify
the roadblock, make a U turn, and then plan some
different Yeah. Yeah, it had to still get to its
to its end location. Um. And what was interesting was
that eleven teams went on to the final challenge. That
challenge required the robots to visit specific checkpoints and the
teams were not notified of the checkpoint locations until five
(10:08):
minutes before the launch, so they had a map of
the entire space, like they knew what the digital file
that had all the map of the fake town, but
they didn't know where the checkpoints we're going to be
on that map until five minutes before they were pulling
out the star the route and exactly they had to
do it right there in real time. The course also
(10:30):
had thirty vehicles with drivers moving through the course during
the test, so you had real live drivers on the
course at the same time, and about half the vehicles
were removed from the course for various errors. And here's
the fun part. One of the errors was the Terra
Max vehicle that nearly drove into the old Commissary building
on the Air Force space, so they were able to
stop it just before it drove into a building. Um.
(10:53):
And also the team you you see f car spontaneously
decided to park at a car port and just take
a break, just pulled into a car poard and stopped,
just like y'all, I give up, I am done with
this test. They eventually disqualified it. Cornell and uh Cornell
and M I. T S vehicles gently bumped into each other.
(11:13):
I like to say they were trading paint. They were
trying to share a lane together, but they were allowed
to continue the course once they were separated and totally
given a little time out. UH. And then first place
on that went to a team called Tartan Racing out
of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the second place went to Stanford again. UH.
First prize was two million dollars again. So ultimately six
(11:35):
teams finished the challenge that year, which showed that even
though they wrapped up the difficulty, they still had six
teams from across the United States complete that course, which
really showed the development of technology in the span of
two years, because we remember in two thousand four no
one finished, well three years really, because it was two
thousand seven when they did Urban Challenge, right, And of
course at this point in two thousand seven, many cars,
(11:57):
if not most cars, had on board computers. We're controlling
a lot of different systems. It was mostly monitoring, but yeah,
there was some control as well. But of course after
these challenges, some tech companies a little curious. Are you
talking about a company that rhymes with schmoogle? Um? I
(12:18):
might be Okay, I remember when this news broke because
I have a friend who works at Google who told
me that he didn't tell me about the car. He
just told me. It's like there's something that's so cool
going on at Google, and I can't wait for it
to become public because you're gonna flip out. And it
took about half a year before the news became public
from when he told me, and sure enough I flipped out.
(12:40):
They actually recruited from the challenges they did. In fact,
the guy who is the project leader UM is in
fact a one of the members of the Stanford team
that won Sebastian. He won that two thousand and five challenge,
so he was part of the the winning team back then.
And uh, and there are a few others who also
(13:01):
are working with Google that participated in the Grand Challenge,
and other people who participated in the Grand Challenge are
working for specific car companies, so not just Google. Google
was not the only one to pull talent from this group.
There are other car companies that that did as well, right,
But so Google got to work um decking out some
(13:22):
other proprietary vehicles. They weren't creating their own car from scratch.
That's one thing to make clear. Yeah, the first one
that I remember being released to the public, or the
information that's released to the public, was a Toyota Prius actually,
but they also they've used Lexus, Yes they have, which
is also a Toyota company. Yeah, but so they in
two thousand and ten, I believe it was, they went
(13:43):
public with r Yeah, they have been working on it
for like a year, but that was when we found
out about it. Yeah, there was a big Google blog
post where they announced that, look, you know where there
are all these traffic accidents, um cars, they're not driving efficiently,
and people are spending way too much time behind the wheel.
We can solve all three of these problems at once
(14:06):
if we create self driving cars, right, just take people
out of the equation and everything goes better because removing
quote the loose nut between the gas pedal and the
steering wheel. That's my favorite. That's my favorite joke. Mechanics. Yeah,
as as we talked about in the previous episodes, the
National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration estimates that more than
(14:26):
road crashes are due to human error. Yeah, I've seen
I've seen figures everywhere between that that's huge. Like if
you could remove that then you would significantly decrease the
number of injuries and deaths, perhaps terribly upset the car
insurance industry, but which you know, that's okay. Uh. You
(14:48):
also have efficiency to consider. Machine drivers are going to
be way more efficient than human drivers because they have
like established rules that govern when they gas and break,
especially once you set up a network of these things
and these at times cars start working together to clear
out traffic exactly. Yeah. In two thousand twelve UM and
(15:09):
I Trip Police study, they they estimated that they think
a highway filled entirely with autonomous cars instead of with
human driven cars, can increase the capacity of that highway
five times. Um. Yeah. Now, now we just have to
get to the point where we don't need jobs anymore,
(15:30):
and then we'll just stay at home in our cars
will drive everywhere for us for no reason. Perfect. Uh. Yeah,
you know what's interesting to me? Do you know what
they You know what the Google car uses as a
primary sensor, right? Is it light ar? Yeah? Have you
heard about this? Okay, So imagine the lasers l sixty
four lasers. That's not radar for detecting lies, Um, L
(15:52):
I D A R. Yes, it's it's sixty four lasers
all right. So imagine that you've got a pack of
sixty four lasers and a turret top of a car,
and that tour. It rotates at six centered revolutions per minute.
And what's doing is it's just constantly scanning its environment
so that it can detect minute changes as as it's
traveling through a space, so it knows not only what
(16:15):
stationary objects are nearby, it can track when things are
moving and then be able to plot against that. UM. Now, granted,
I think I think in every case that I've read,
Google only allows people who are using these cars to
operate them on highways. Once they pull off onto surface streets,
it has to go under manual control by Google's policy. UM.
(16:38):
And of course these are not cars that are allowed
outside of the realms of Google. But that is changing. Yeah,
I mean, what's what's interesting is that, you know, it
was two thousand ten when Google unveiled this, and there
weren't really any laws on the books that would allow
for autonomous cars. In fact, most of the laws in
the world specify that you have to have a driver
(17:02):
behind the wheel in control of the vehicle at all times.
But actually that is now changing, and in a few
places in the United States it's already changed. Right in California, Nevada,
and Florida, there have been laws passed that specifically allow
for the testing of autonomous cars. Nevada was the first
in in two thousand eleven, they passed Assembly Buill number
five eleven, And what that basically did was it allowed
(17:26):
the state Department of Transportation to revise their laws to
accommodate for autonomous cars. Now, in this case, there's still
has to be a driver behind the wheel, but the
driver does not have to be in control of the
vehicle at all times. Yeah. Um. And so Nevada actually
followed through with that and in two thousand twelve they
officially approved a license for autonomous cars. Yes, I saw
(17:48):
that May of two thousand twelve. I know that Florida,
Florida being one of the other states that allowed for
autonomous car testing. This is I honestly don't know the
reasoning behind this. I'm just gonna throw it out there
and see if you guys think it's realistic. Do you
think that it's possibly because of the aged population in
Florida that this was something that Florida was interested in. Well,
(18:10):
I don't know, but I mean I've read that a
lot of the reasoning behind autonomous cars is giving more
mobility to people, say who like don't see as well
as they used to, um, but would still like to
be able to have some independent movement around the city.
I would guess that that Disney might have something to
say about that as well. Automos cars are legal in
(18:31):
California and Florida. Those are the two places where Disney
parks are in the United States. So um, Google is
also in California. So collusion is a little is a little,
a little on the flimsy side. Uh. So that's where
it is so far. I believe d C also, I
think has been working on this, but now um, there
are a bunch of states that are starting to considering it. Yeah,
(18:52):
and the federal government is kind of saying you know,
of course, in the United States, for those who are
not in the United States, we have state governments and
we have the federal government. The federal government has been
on record as saying, guys, you might want to slow
down a little bit before you start passing all this
legislation on the state by state basis, simply because we
don't have enough data here to be able to legislate responsibly.
(19:15):
Whereas the technology companies are saying, look, all the data
that's coming back is showing that this is way safer
than the alternative. So right, a report published by the
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which which is a nonprofit
although it is funded by the American auto industry um
and said that collision warning and breaking systems are already
(19:35):
helping drivers avoid accidents. Um that that statistically, if you
were drive, if you are in a car that has
these systems, you are less likely to be in an accident. Yeah.
And also it's good to keep in mind that typically
these laws, uh, they sort of unveil these new motor
rights in different stages, so they're opened on private roads
before they are on public roads, right, Um. And I
(19:56):
guess that's to allow for testing. And and it's it's
not just Google Old that's getting into this game. Actually,
there are quite a few companies that are all investing
in their own automated car technology. Toyota is another one,
BMW four GM, Volvo, Audi, Mercedes, Benz, Nissan, Right, right, Toyota. Yeah,
(20:17):
all of these have at least in the testing stages
various forms of these things, and a lot of them
are saying that within the next ten years they're going
to be rolling out, if not fully automated cars at
least um auto assist cars with more, because again, this
may be one of those things where because of the
legislative barriers, there may be some time that we'll have
(20:37):
to wait to see automated cars being available for the
average consumer. I'm sure they'll be prohibitively expensive for most
people when they first when they first hit the roads
as well, But I think it's gonna be. I think
it's gonna be a few years just because of the
legislative side. But we will still benefit from that technology
in other ways, with more more advanced cry prevention systems,
(21:01):
parking assistance, that kind of stuff. Yeah, speaking to the price,
I believe right now an autonomous car is running about
a hundred and fifty thou dollars. Yea. I saw one
guy say that that there's always the possibility that before
we see fully autonomous cars rolling off the manufacturing plants
out of all these these companies, that we may see
(21:21):
aftermarket kits where you can convert a car over to
an autonomous vehicle. But even that would be in the
hundred dozen dollar range, so still not cheap. Sure, Yeah,
And you know the kinds of companies that are putting
out things that you can buy right now that are
partially autonomous are like Mercedes Benz, which has a radar
and stereoscopic cameras that will help you determine, you know,
(21:43):
help your car determine the speed of traffic around you
and also your position within a lane and keep you
there up to speeds of about eighteen miles per hour. Yeah,
and I think, uh GM, they've said that they're they're
going to have partially autonomous cadillacs by well, we'll see.
That's really close. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and partially autonomous. I
mean that's vague enough where you could argue that there
(22:05):
are cars on the market right now that have that
one of the upcoming systems and that I'm excited about.
And and another another sponsor plug, This one is from Toyota.
UM is a cooperative adaptive cruise control, part of which
uses transceivers to broadcast speed, acceleration, and breaking in between
different cars on the road, so that way you can
maintain the proper vehicle distance between you and the car
(22:27):
in front of you. That kind of thing, right with
something a little bit more interactive than just the the lasers.
The receptors that are that are figuring out what's going
on more than just an alarm or something on those lines. Yeah.
In fact, um M I T had a great little
post about some recent research that came out of the
(22:48):
Google experiments. A. Google has been running these these cars
for something like over three hundred thousand miles accumulatively. If
you had them all up together, it's like three miles
of travel time. They've had one accident, and according to
according to Google, that was done while the car was
under manual control, not under computer control. So I think
(23:09):
they also got rear ended ones. Yeah, but the when
they took the black box readings, because a lot of
what is going into these autonomous cars is also a
very intricate um recording system for everything that's going on
in the car. I mean, you know, they are in
the testing stages, so of course that data is very valuable. Um.
But it proved that the autonomous car breaked appropriately and
(23:33):
that the guy behind him that rear ended him was
not paying attention and just just just hit him because
because the car did exactly what was supposed to do. Yeah,
a lot of this research that's going on right now
is about how to manage the interface between humans and computers,
and you know where a human should take over, where
a computer should take over, what specialties both of these
operators can have. And some of the questions being posed
(23:56):
are about, you know, whether or not reckless driving behavior
is actually really important in some situations. You know, whether
or not a computer could handle a situation wherein you
kind of need to go over a line, or you
need to speed up or slow down at a at
a rate of speed that isn't otherwise advisable, or break
a traffic law. Now, it does seem that for the
most part, the uh, the autonomous cars are able to
(24:19):
respond much much faster than any human could, in a
more smooth transition than humans. However, that's that's based upon
a certain set of rules. Well, yeah, and and assuming
that everyone is in an autonomous car, that's fine. But
when you are the one person in an autonomous car
and you're driving in a town full of crazy people
(24:40):
like go on no Atlanta, then maybe that your car
is doing everything that's right, but you know, it may
still not save you from a crash. Of course, we
can't plan for everybody's behavior, obviously, you can only do
the best you can. One of the other interesting things
from that m I T post was that the data
shows that automated car spin time and what they called
(25:01):
near collision states, meaning that that that's how you usually drive.
I don't drive at all, so so that makes it easy.
Uh yeah, but ner if I were to drive, I'd
be in a constant near collision state. And some might
argue that Georgia is a near collision state, but the
you know, the the actual definition there is when you
are engaging in behaviors that are more likely to cause
(25:24):
the collision, things like accelerating too quickly, breaking too quickly,
following too close, following much too closely. In the automated cars,
because you set up these very specific rules for them
to follow, they have to follow those rules, so they
tend to operate within much safer parameters than your typical
driver would. Though also I've read if if you were
to imagine entirely automated highway, those cars can follow much
(25:48):
more closely, much more safely, if you were able if
everyone were automated, Like if if either of these we
have that infrastructure and all the cars are talking to
one another, then the theoretically you could do that and
also ours behind you know, larger vehicles would even benefit
from drafting at the point you're talking about saving a fuel,
But you know that's building out an infrastructure is is
(26:11):
really really hard, and uh, I think I think we'll
see automated cars before we see automated infrastructures on a
wide scale basis. Though, an interesting thing about the most
recent developments and automated cars is they might not depend
on that much infrastructure like we used to imagine that. Well,
(26:31):
in order to really have automated highways, you need like
you know, computers in the roads that control everything, right,
But we're creating fleets of automated cars today that do
you just find simply by reacting to each other, right,
and or through differential GPS systems so that they're paying
attention to to not only your position via satellite, but
(26:51):
via markers in the road. Right. Like I said, I think,
I think there are a couple of different barriers that
we have to get over for automated cars to become
a reality for the average consumer. The big one being legislative,
because I think it is going to take a lot
of work to get to a point where automated cars
have a legal designation that is recognized, not just within
(27:12):
a state, but between states and within between countries even
for them to be a viable form of transportation, I think.
I think the thing that's going to help with that
is is the parallel to all of this, where in
insurance companies are providing black boxes as an opt in
option for opt in option, that was a really great
turn of phrase for for for their drivers to potentially
(27:34):
get a lower rate on their car insurance. And not
many people, but maybe like about a third of people
I supposedly are signing up for these things, and so
they're starting to gather data on driving habits a lot more.
On top of that, the other barrier I would say
is we've seen this happen a lot in various networks,
right where you get a proprietary network where other networks
(27:56):
can't necessarily communicate with it. So, for example, we talked
about an automated house, and right now, you can do
a lot of automation at home. But the easiest way
of doing that is to buy all your stuff from
one source, because buying it from multiple sources means you
have to find some way of making them communicate with
each other. Sure, however, if you have for example, and
UM Apple TV and also an iPhone and also right,
(28:19):
if you're all within one ecosystem, you're great, but if
you're not. If you're if your ecosystem is not homogeneous,
then you're in trouble. Well, as we know, traffic is
not a homogeneous situation. People have all sorts of different
cars out there from different models, models and different makers.
So unless we were to have an agreed upon SEV
standards that all vehicles were using in order for their
(28:42):
UH information to communicate properly, then you have potentially a
fleet of cars that doesn't really communicate with each other
very well. That they need to all speak the same language.
And um, that's something that maybe has yet to be devised.
In fact, I think we talked in our previous podcast
about this about maybe the need for something like a
traffic protocol. Yeah, yes, yeah, And it's one of those
(29:04):
things where you you need either there needs to either
be a leader in the space and everyone ends up
following suit because they just they've defined it, or there
needs to be some sort of regulation. Yeah. Like like
and where did i P camp come from? Oh, well,
that came out of our bonette, So that was like
a public initiative that created the protocol that all of
the private organizations would end up using. Right, so you
(29:25):
could get it some form of independent entity like maybe
even the I E. Being able to come up and
you know, a group of engineers that come up with
a A a standard language that would be used. But
I mean, all of this is jumping way ahead. We
still aren't entirely sure when we'll see these cars um
become something that we could actually purchase. To mention i E. Again,
(29:48):
they predicted it also last year that in their view,
by of cars on the road will be autonomous. That'll
be how that's a that's bold. I would love that
future so much. Just I'm imagining how traffic would become
such uh so much more smooth. Studies showed the young
(30:12):
people like this idea. It's more popular more. I'm liking
it even more now. Uh well, young young people are
certainly the ones who are most likely to pick up
these black boxes from their insurance companies. So I so
I guess that would that would make perfect sense. Yeah,
But I mean I think I like it the most
because I don't drive, So for me having something like
(30:35):
this where maybe I do, you know, drive occasionally, but
I have a vehicle that does most of my driving
for me would give me uh even more freedom, or
more importantly, would mean my wife is no longer my chauffeur.
Oh sure, And as we talked about in that previous episode,
it would certainly open doors to people who are who
are unable to drive for various physical health sure yeah
(30:58):
or not health. But I remember I do. I did
read one thing from uh M I T Professor John Leonard,
who has worked on navigation systems for autonomous cars, who
said he doesn't believe we'll see a totally autonomous taxi
service within his lifetime. He doesn't think that's ever going
to happen while he's still uh, you know, walking treading
the earth so uh, and he's he's working on the problem.
(31:22):
And it's not again, it's not just a technological thing.
It's also a social thing. And that was kind of
what he was pointing out, that that taxi drivers um
provide an important role in society, particularly if they are
efficient and nice. Uh. He was talking about this about Manhattan,
but said, really, I mean more of the European style
(31:42):
taxi drivers. I was about to say, alright, so I
think I think we're good on self driving cars for
the near future. Of course, I say that probably tomorrow
there'll be some breaking news they'll necessitate us to do
a whole new podcast. But that's okay because I love
this topic. So guys, make sure you go to FW
thinking dot com. That is our homepage where you can
find the blog posts, podcasts, videos, articles, all sorts of
(32:06):
cool information about the future. Go check that out, and
also look for us on Facebook and Twitter with the
handle f W Thinking and we will talk to you
again really soon. For more on this topic in the
future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com brought to
(32:35):
you by Toyota. Let's go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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