Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Electric Vehicles are moving up, at least here in California, and it's gotten to the point that EV drivers are finding all the charging stations where they want to go already in use, forcing them to travel well outside their way, or to panic. Sometimes not charging is not an option. Sometimes the car taking the spot is already mostly charged or doesn't need the charge much, but the owner has not come back.

Here in Silicon Valley, there is a problem that the bulk of the EVs have 60 to 80 miles of range -- OK for wandering around the valley, but not quite enough for a trip to San Francisco and back, at least not a comfortable one. And we do like to go to San Francisco. The natives up there don't really need the chargers in a typical day, but the visitors do. In general, unless you are certain you are going to get a charger, you won't want to go in a typical EV. Sure, a Tesla has no problem, but a Tesla has a ridiculous amount of battery in it. You spend $40,000 on the battery pack in the Tesla, but use the second half of its capacity extremely rarely -- it's not cost effective outside the luxury market, at least at today's prices (and also because of the weight.)

Charging stations are somewhat expensive. Even home stations cost from $400 to $800 because they must now include EVSE protocol equipment. This does a digital negotiation between the car and the plug on how much power is available and when to send it. The car must not draw more current than the circuit can handle, and you want the lines to not be live until the connection is solid. For now that's expensive (presumably because of the high current switching gear.) Public charging stations also need a way to doing billing and access control.

Another limit on public charging stations, however, is the size of the electrical service. A typical car wants 30 amps, or up to 50 if you can get it. Put in more than a few of those and you're talking an upgrade to the building's electrical service in many cases.

I propose a public charging pole which has 4 or even 8 cords on it. This pole would be placed at the intersection of 4 parking spots in a parking lot. (That's not very usual, more often they end up placed against a wall, with only 2 parking spots in range, because that's where the power is.) The station, however, may not have enough power to charge all the cables at once.

At CES, there were a couple of "selfie drones." The Nixie is designed to be worn on your wrist, taken off, thrown, and then it returns to you after taking a photo or video. There was also the Zano which is fancier and claims it will follow you around, tracking you as you mountain bike or ski to make a video of you just as you do your cool trick.

In continuation of my series on fixing politics I would like to address the issue of debates. Not just presidential debates, but all levels.

There is great buzz about some sensor-laden vehicles being driven around the USA which have been discovered to be owned by Apple Computer. The vehicles have cameras and LIDARs and GPS antennas and many are wondering is this an Apple Self-Driving Car? See also speculation from cult of Mac.

Bitcoin's been on a long decline over the past year, and today is around $220 per coin. The value has always been based on speculation about Bitcoin's future value, not its present value, so it's been very hard to predict and investment in the coins has been risky.

Some thinking led me to a scary conclusion. Recent news has revealed that a number of "cloud mining" companies have shut down after the price drop. Let me explain why.

After yesterday's story about Uber and CMU, a lot of speculation has flown that Uber will now be at odds with Google, both about building robocars and also on providing network taxi service, since another rumour said Google plans to launch an Uber like "ride share" service.

I commonly see statements from connected car advocates that vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure communications are an important, even essential technology for robocar development. Readers of this blog will know I disagree strongly, and while I think I2V will be important (done primarily over the existing mobile data network) I suspect that V2V is only barely useful, with minimal value cases that have a hard time justifying its cost.

Of late, though, my forecast for V2V grows even more dismal, because I wonder if robocars will implement V2V with human-driven cars at all, even if it becomes common for ordinary cars to have the technology because of a legal mandate.

The problem is security. A robocar is a very dangerous machine. Compromised, it can cause a lot of damage, even death. As such, security will have a very strong focus in development. You don't want anybody breaking into the computer systems or your car or anybody else's. You really don't want it.

One clear fact that people in security know -- a very large fraction of computer security breaches caused by software faults have come from programs that receive input data from external sources, in particular when you will accept data from anybody. Internet tools are the biggest culprits, and there is a long history of buffer overflows, injection attacks and other trouble that has fallen on tools which will accept a message from just anyone. Servers (which openly accept messages from outside) are at the greatest risk, but even client tools like web browsers run into trouble because they go to vast numbers of different web sites, and it's not hard to trick people to sending them to a random web site.

We work very hard to remove these vulnerabilities, because when you're writing a web tool, you have no choice. You must accept input from random strangers. Holes still get found, and we pay the price.

The simplest strategy to improve your chances is to go deaf. Don't receive inputs from outside at all. You can't do that in most products, but if you can close off a channel without impeding functionality it's a good approach. Generally you will do the following to be more secure:

1. Be a client, which means you make communications requests, you do not receive them.
2. You only connect to places you trust. You avoid allowing yourself to be directed to connect to other things
3. You use digital signature and encryption to assure that you really are talking to your trusted server.

This doesn't protect you perfectly. Your home server can be compromised -- it often will be running in an environment not as locked down as this. In fact, if it becomes your relay for messages from outside, as it must, it has a vector for attack. Still, the extra layer adds some security.

Rumours reported in TechCrunch suggest Uber is opening a robocar lab in Pittsburgh and hiring up to 50 CMU folks to staff it.

Update: On the Uber blog we now see it's more funding of research labs at CMU, on many topics

Uber's gotten a lot of bad press over its surge pricing system. As prices soared during Storm Sandy and a hostage crisis in Sydney, people saw it as price gouging when times are tough.

As some of you may know, I have been working as chair of computing and networking at Singularity University. The most rewarding part of that job is our ten week summer Graduate Studies Program. GSP15 will be our 7th year of it.

Some new results from the NGV Team at the University of Michigan describe different approaches for perception (detecting obstacles on the road) and localizations (figuring out precisely where you are.) Ford helped fund some of the research so they issued press releases about it and got some media stories. Here's a look at what they propose.

Let me confess a secret fear. I suspect that the first "autopilot" functions on cars is going to be a bit boring.

I'm talking the offerings like traffic jam assist from Mercedes, super cruise from Cadillac and others. The faster highway assist versions which combine ADAS functions like lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control to keep the car in its lane and a fixed distance from the car in front of you. What Tesla has promoted and what scrappy startup "Cruise" plans to offer as a retrofit later this year. This is, in NHTSA's flawed "levels" document what could be called supervision type 2.

Some of them also offer lane change, if you approve the safety of the change.

All these products will drive your car, slow or fast on highways, but they require your supervision. They may fail to find the lane in certain circumstances, because the makers are badly painted, or confusing, or just missing, or the light is wrong. When they do they'll kick out and insist you drive. They'll really insist, and you are expected to be behind the wheel, watching and grabbing it quickly -- ideally even noticing the failure before the system does.

Some will kick out quite rarely. Others will do it several times during a typical commute. But the makers will insist you be vigilant, not just to cover their butts legally, but because in many situations you really do need to be vigilant.

Testing shows that operators of these cars get pretty confident, especially if they are not kicking out very often. They do things they are told not to do. Pick up things to read. Do e-mails and texts. This is no surprise -- people are texting even now when the car isn't driving for them at all.

To reduce that, most companies are planning what they call "countermeasures" to make sure you are paying attention to the road. Some of them make you touch the wheel every 8 to 10 seconds. Some will have a camera watching your eyes that sounds an alarm if you look away from the road for too long. If you don't keep alert, and ignore the alarms, the cars will either come to a stop in the middle of the freeway, or perhaps even just steer wild and run off the road. Some vendors are talking about how to get the car to pull off safely to the side of the road.

There is debate about whether all this will work, whether the countermeasures or other techniques will assure safety. But let's leave that aside for a moment, and assume it works, and people stay safe.

I'm now asking the harder question, is this a worthwhile product? I've touted it as a milestone -- a first product put out to customers. That Mercedes offered traffic jam assist in the 2014 S-Class and others followed with that and freeway autopilots is something I tell people in my talks to make it clear this is not just science fiction ideas and cute prototypes. Real, commercial development is underway.

That's all true, and I would like these products. What I fear though, is whether it will be that much more useful or relaxing as adaptive cruise control (ACC.) You probably don't have ACC in your car. Uptake on it is quite low -- as an individual add-on, usually costing $1,000 to $2,000, only 1-2% of car buyers get it. It's much more commonly purchased as part of a "technology package" for more money, and it's not sure what the driving force behind the purchase is.

Highway and traffic jam autopilot is just a "pleasant" feature, as is ACC. It makes driving a bit more relaxing, once you trust it. But it doesn't change the world, not at all.

I admit to not having this in my car yet. I've sat in the driver's seat of Google's car some number of times, but there I've been on duty to watch it carefully. I got special driver training to assure I had the skills to deal with problem situations. It's very interesting, but not relaxing. Some folks who have commuted long term in such cars have reported it to be relaxing.

A Step to greater things?

If highway autopilot is just a luxury feature, and doesn't change the world, is it a stepping stone to something that does? From a standpoint of marketing, and customer and public reaction, it is. From a technical standpoint, I am not so sure.

For many decades, cameras have come with a machine screw socket (1/4"-20) in the bottom to mount them on a tripod. This is slow to use and easy to get loose, so most photographers prefer to use a quick-release plate system. You screw a plate on the camera, and your tripod head has a clamp to hold those plates. The plates are ideally custom made so they grip an edge on the camera to be sure they can't twist.

In my earlier article on robocar challenges I gave very brief coverage to the issue of parking. Challenged on that, I thought it was time to expand.

The world "parking" means many things, and the many classes of parking problems have varying difficulties.

I'm sure, like me, you have lots of electronic gadgets that have status LEDs on them. Some of these just show the thing is on, some blink when it's doing things. Of late, as blue LEDs have gotten cheap, it has been very common to put disturbingly bright blue LEDs on items.

Robocar news continues after CES with announcements from the Detroit Auto Show (and a tiny amount from the TRB meeting.)

Google doesn't talk a lot about their car, so address by Chris Urmson at the Detroit Auto Show generated a lot of press. Notable statements from Chris included:

Day 3 at CES started with a visit to BMW's demo. They were mostly test driving new cars like the i3 and M series cars, but for a demo, they made the i3 deliver itself along a planned corridor. It was a mostly stock i3 electric car with ultrasonic sensors -- and the traffic jam assist disabled. When one test driver dropped off the car, they scanned it, and then a BMW staffer at the other end of a walled course used a watch interface to summon that car.

After a short Day 1 at CES a more full day was full of the usual equipment -- cameras, TVs, audio and the like and visits to several car booths.

I've expanded my gallery of notable things with captions with cars and other technology.

A reasonable volume of robocar related stuff here at CES. I just had a few hours today, and went to see the much touted Mercedes F015 "Luxury in Motion." This is a concept and not a planned vehicle, but it draws together a variety of ideas -- most of which we've seen before -- with some new explorations.

When Southwest started using tablets for in-flight entertainment, I lauded it. Everybody has been baffled by just how incredibly poor most in-flight video systems are. They tend to be very slow, with poor interfaces and low resolution screens. Even today it's common to face a small widescreen that takes a widescreen film, letterboxes it and then pillarboxes it, with only an option to stretch it and make it look wrong. All this driven by a very large box in somebody's footwell.