Fully autonomous vehicles are already operating on city streets, but a study published last year in AI and Ethics reported that 74% of survey respondents said they do not trust AVs nor believe AVs can perform better than a normal driver. However, a number of companies are developing technologies to enhance safety for and around autonomous vehicles in urban areas. According to Statista, 58 million autonomous vehicles are projected to be sold globally in 2030. Cities need to be ready for them. "The nation's city leaders see that AV technology is here so it cannot be ignored or left in a regulatory limbo while it operates on our streets," said Houston city council member and Vice Mayor Pro Tem Martha Castex-Tatum in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure earlier this year.

An algorithm makes self-driving cars'accident-proof' as long as other human drivers on the road act responsibly, scientists claim. German researchers developed the algorithm with data collected from vehicles in the real-world and tested it in computer simulations. Assuming that other traffic drivers follow the rules of the road, the algorithm can take into account unexpected events, such as the appearance of cyclists. Autonomous vehicles can only be widely adopted once they can be trusted to drive more safely than human drivers. Therefore, teaching them how to respond to unique situations to the same capability as a human will be crucial to their full roll out.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Combining human and artificial intelligence in autonomous vehicles could push self-driving cars more quickly toward wide-scale adoption, researchers say. That's the goal of a new project that relies on a technique called instantaneous crowdsourcing to provide a cost-effective, real-time remote backup for onboard autonomous systems without the need for a human to be physically in the driver's seat. "Today's autonomous vehicles can drive relatively well in typical settings, but they fail in exceptional situations…" The need for human safety drivers in vehicles like Waymo's recently introduced autonomous taxis undermines their cost advantage compared to traditional ride sharing services, the researchers say. It also keeps the era of cars as autonomous rolling living rooms tantalizingly out of reach.

Shortly after one of its autonomous minivans was involved in a crash while operating in manual mode, Waymo got a slice of stage time at Google I/O to discuss its self-driving cars, using that time explain the role of artificial intelligence in autonomous driving. In a Medium post elaborating on the points made in the I/O keynote, Waymo Chief Technical Officer Dmitri Dolgov said it uses A.I. to train self-driving cars to identify their surroundings in a manner similar to human drivers. Waymo started out as Google's internal self-driving car project before being spun off into a separate unit. There was a significant amount of cross-pollination between autonomous car engineering and the Google Brain A.I. program during the early stages of both projects, according to Dolgov. Among other things, this allowed error rate for pedestrian detection in self-driving cars to be reduced 100 times in just a few months, Dolgov said.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. It was bound to happen. With autonomous vehicles on the streets across the country, one of them--through computer error, supervisor carelessness, or a pedestrian's mistake--was going to hit someone. On Monday morning, a self-driving Uber with a supervising driver struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she tried to cross eight lanes of traffic in Tempe, Arizona. Herzberg's death was the first recorded fatality caused by a self-driving car.

In the increasingly fierce--if not entirely tangible--fight for the exploding self-driving car market, Lyft stands out for its free love vibes. The company encourages anyone and everyone with robo-car tech to deploy its vehicles on Lyft's ride-hailing network. In a business that could be worth trillions before long, Lyft wants to be the middleman for the everyman, the platform that will connect cars to riders--and take its slice of the money, of course. So far, Ford, Waymo, Jaguar Land Rover, and Aptiv (a self-driving spinoff from supplier Delphi) have thrown their keys in the bowl. At the same time, Lyft announced last July it was developing its own autonomous driving technology, hiring hundreds of engineers to fill a building in Palo Alto.

Last year, a Florida man became the first person to die in a crash involving autonomous driving technology. Forty-year-old Joshua Brown had his hands off the wheel when his car slammed into a semi-trailer making a left turn across his lane. The incident caused considerable consternation in the media, not the least for underlining the glaring absence of autonomous vehicle (AV) regulations then in place. "The fatal crash," the Los Angeles Times said, "highlighted what some say is a gaping pothole on the road to self-driving vehicles: the lack of federal rules." The newspaper had a point.

Cameras help autonomous vehicles read street signs and the color of traffic lights. But LiDARs, aka light detection and ranging systems, do the important work of sensing and helping cars avoid obstacles, whether that's a fallen tree, drunk driver, or a child running out into the road. Now, a startup called Luminar Technologies Inc., is unveiling a high-resolution LiDAR sensor that was five years in the making. The startup, which has raised $36 million in seed-stage funding so far, built its LiDAR systems from scratch. That means the company engineered its own: lasers, receivers, chips, packaging and more, rather than incorporating off-the-shelf components. Investors in Luminar have included: Canvas Ventures, GVA Capital, and the Peter Thiel-backed 1517 Fund.

Cameras help autonomous vehicles read street signs and the color of traffic lights. But LiDARs, aka light detection and ranging systems, do the important work of sensing and helping cars avoid obstacles, whether that's a fallen tree, drunk driver, or a child running out into the road. Now, a startup called Luminar Technologies Inc., is unveiling a high-resolution LiDAR sensor that was five years in the making. The startup, which has raised $36 million in seed-stage funding so far, built its LiDAR systems from scratch. That means the company engineered its own: lasers, receivers, chips, packaging and more, rather than incorporating off-the-shelf components. Investors in Luminar have included: Canvas Ventures, GVA Capital, and the Peter Thiel-backed 1517 Fund.

Ford is going all in on self-driving tech. The automaker said today it plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company founded by former Google and Uber employees to develop autonomous driving technology. "We think automation is going to define the automobile in the next decade, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford's moving assembly line did 100 years ago," Mark Fields, Ford's president and chief executive, said at a press event in San Francisco announcing the partnership. Argo AI will work exclusively with Ford on building a virtual driver system, with the goal of Ford delivering an autonomous vehicle in 2021. While everything Argo AI works on during that time will be made available exclusively to Ford, over time there's the potential for Argo AI to also license that technology to other automakers.