Advocates of driverless cars worry that the fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc. vehicle in self-driving mode will provoke additional regulatory oversight and slow deployment on U.S. roads of the rapidly advancing technology. The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration aims this month to release a framework for regulating self-driving cars, which could include requiring auto makers to win approval for their technologies before releasing them. That sort of approval process wasn't applied to Tesla's Autopilot system to enable hands-free driving on highways, which the electric-car maker made available on Tesla vehicles via a software update in October. Regulators said Thursday that an Ohio man was using Autopilot when his Tesla Model S crashed into a 18-wheel truck in Florida on May 7, killing him. "There will be repercussions" in regulations, said Dean Pomerleau, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has worked on driverless cars for 25 years and led several NHTSA research programs.

The man killed in a crash while using the autopilot function of a Tesla Model S electric vehicle posted a YouTube video a month before the fatal crash showing the technology saving him from another collision and wrote that he was "very impressed." I have done a lot of testing with the sensors in the car and the software capabilities," Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, wrote on April 5 in comments posted with the 41-second video. "I have always been impressed with the car, but I had not tested the car's side collision avoidance," he said. Then on May 7, Brown, a former Navy Seal, was killed when his Tesla crashed into a tractor trailer in Williston, Fla. Federal regulators said Thursday they had opened an investigation into the fatality, thought to be the first in the auto industry involving an autonomous driving feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its Office of Defects Investigation was conducting a preliminary evaluation of the autopilot function. The agency is expected to issue guidelines for autonomous vehicles this month. Automakers do not need to have autonomous driving functions approved by NHTSA but must certify their vehicles meet safety standards. Calling Brown's death "a tragic loss," Tesla said it was the first-known fatality involving its autopilot feature. The technology, which is in public beta testing and must be activated by the driver, has been used in 130 million miles of driving without a fatality, the company said. The crash took place at 3:40 p.m. May 7 on U.S. Route 27A during clear and dry conditions, according to the accident report from the Florida Highway Patrol. Brown's vehicle was headed east when a tractor trailer driven by Frank Baressi of Palm Harbor, Fla., traveling in the opposite direction, made a left turn onto a side street. The Tesla's roof hit the underside of the tractor trailer. The car skidded under the truck and off the road, plowing through two wire fences before crashing into a utility pole, the accident report said. Baressi told the Associated Press that Brown was "playing'Harry Potter' on the TV screen" in the car when the crash took place. Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, told The Times that a portable DVD player was found in the Tesla but said she did not know whether it had been in use. "At the time of the impact, we don't know what the status of that DVD player was.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your unibrowed Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We don't usually lead Video Friday with a long talk, but Nic Radford was at Campus Party in Mexico to talk about Valkyrie and the DRC. It's a tremendous talk, with lots of candid detail and video that we've never seen before.

A Tesla Model S electric vehicle is shown in San Francisco, California. DETROIT -- It was the crash the auto industry knew was coming but still feared. The death of a driver who was using Tesla Motors' semi-autonomous mode could add to the public's apprehension of driverless cars even before they reach the road in big numbers. Most major automakers and technology companies, including Google and Uber, are working on fully autonomous cars, and have worried that a highly publicized crash could hurt those efforts. Brown was an enthusiastic booster of his 2015 Tesla Model S and in an April video he posted online he credited its sophisticated Autopilot system for avoiding a crash when a commercial truck swerved into his lane on an interstate. Owner video of Autopilot steering to avoid collision with a truckhttps://t.co/FZUAXSjlR7

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday that as many as 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. In its first public assessment, the administration said the death toll was between 64 and 116 civilians between January 2009 and December 2015, which is significantly lower than civilian casualty estimates by various human rights groups. The number of combatants killed in those 473 strikes was between 2,372 and 2,581. Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama signed an executive order that details U.S. policies to limit civilian casualties and makes protecting civilians a central element in U.S. military operations planning. The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates.

The crash that killed a Tesla driver in Florida on Thursday when his car struck a tractor-trailer may mark the world's first fatal accident in which a computer was at the wheel. The crash occurred when the truck turned left across the 2015 Model S Tesla's path and the car's autopilot failed to slow down. The deadly accident, which took the life of 40-year-old Joshua David Brown of Ohio, is bound to raise a lot of questions about vehicle automation and the future of car travel. It may be tempting to describe this as a driverless car crash, but don't give in. There's a big difference between assisted driving technologies and full automation, and what we have here is the former. We'll get into that below, but let's start first with the nuts and bolts of the autopilot technology at the center of the crash.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

A robot-powered burger joint is coming to San Francisco. In 2012, secretive robotics startup Momentum Machines debuted a machine that could crank out 400 made-to-order hamburgers in an hour. It's fully autonomous, meaning the robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, and assemble and bag the burger without any help from humans. Years of relative silence ensued, but in January, Hoodline's Brittany Hopkins learned that the San Francisco-based startup had applied for a building permit to convert a ground-floor retail space in the SoMa neighborhood into a restaurant. Now it looks like the restaurant is actually happening.

Since the inception of modern fighter planes, it has always been an unspoken assumption that at some point, machines would be flying the aircraft instead of human pilots. This assumption became even more solid once Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology started to pick up. Now, new test results via simulations have shown that AIs are superior to human pilots, particularly when using fighter planes. Engineers that graduated from the University of Cincinnati programmed an AI that was able to outmaneuver and outfly fighter pilots, Wired reports. The program is called "ALPHA," and through multiple simulations against former United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee, the AI came out significantly ahead.

FILE - In this Sept. 15, 2015 file photo, a Tesla Model S is on display on the first press day of the Frankfurt Auto Show IAA in Frankfurt, Germany. Federal officials say the driver of a Tesla S sports car using the vehicle's "autopilot" automated driving system has been killed in a collision with a truck, the first U.S. self-driving car fatality. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicate the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla at a highway intersection. NHTSA said the Tesla driver died due to injuries sustained in the crash, which took place on May 7, 2016 in Williston, Fla. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File) The Associated Press