Stuck in regulatory limbo, the self-driving-vehicle developer is encouraging residents of Washington, DC, to message public officials to help get its robotaxis onto roads. Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday. For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary--and its lobbyists--have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads.

Visitors to CES this week had the opportunity to take a good look at an unusual local: a boxy little autonomous robotaxi designed and operated by Amazon subsidiary Zoox. Zoox has been testing on the Strip since November, though it began driving its purpose-built vehicle on Vegas public roads around its local headquarters back in summer 2023. This year, Zoox aims to begin offering service to the public, first though a "Zoox Explorer" program that allows outside riders to try the service for free. Unlike Waymo's robotaxis, which today are computerized Jaguar EVs, Zoox's AV doesn't have a steering wheel, driver's seat, or pedals. Its seats face inward, and the vehicle is designed to drive in either direction, fore or aft.

The government will allow autonomous driving services on at least 25 public road routes by March next year and on 100 routes at an early date, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Wednesday. In that time period, Level 4 driverless vehicles -- those that are fully autonomous -- will also be seen traveling under specific conditions on some 10 routes after going through a screening process shortened to two months, Kishida told reporters in Taki, Mie Prefecture, where he viewed digital technology-based community development efforts and took a test ride on a self-driving bus. At a ceremony in the town, the prime minster vowed to increase government subsidies to push ahead with a "Digital Garden City" initiative involving Taki and some other towns in the prefecture. Earlier in the day, Kishida visited Kameyama, also in Mie Prefecture, to watch the drilling survey at a candidate location for a station on the planned Nagoya-Osaka section of the Chuo Shinkansen magnetic levitation train line. After the inspection, he said the transport ministry and maglev train operator Central Japan Railway, or JR Tokai, will officially join a group formed by the three western prefectures of Mie, Nara and Osaka to promote the construction of the section.

As the popularity of autonomous vehicles has grown, many standards and regulators, such as ISO, NHTSA, and Euro NCAP, require safety validation to ensure a sufficient level of safety before deploying them in the real world. Manufacturers gather a large amount of public road data for this purpose. However, the majority of these validation activities are done manually by humans. Furthermore, the data used to validate each driving feature may differ. As a result, it is essential to have an efficient data selection method that can be used flexibly and dynamically for verification and validation while also accelerating the validation process. In this paper, we present a data selection method that is practical, flexible, and efficient for assessment of autonomous vehicles. Our idea is to optimize the similarity between the metadata distribution of the selected data and a predefined metadata distribution that is expected for validation. Our experiments on the large dataset BDD100K show that our method can perform data selection tasks efficiently. These results demonstrate that our methods are highly reliable and can be used to select appropriate data for the validation of various safety functions.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) announced Tuesday that it has suspended GM-owned Cruise's permits to operate driverless vehicles in the state -- effective immediately. The suspension was based on several safety-related issues. It isn't yet clear if the move is directly related to an incident earlier this month when a Cruise robotaxi pinned a pedestrian under its tire in San Francisco after another car's hit-and-run. According to an emailed statement the California DMV supplied to Engadget, the suspension was based on safety-related regulations. The CA DMV says it has supplied Cruise with a path back to driverless operation in the state.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has blocked a bill that would have required autonomous trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds (4,536kg) to have human safety drivers on board while operating on public roads. The governor said in a statement that the legislation, which California Senate members passed in a 36-2 vote, was unnecessary. Newsom believes existing laws are sufficient to ensure there's an "appropriate regulatory framework." The governor noted that, under a 2012 law, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles collaborates with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, California Highway Patrol and other relevant bodies "to determine the regulations necessary for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads." Newsom added that the DMV is committed to making sure rules keep up with the pace of evolving autonomous vehicle tech.

Fully autonomous driving has been widely studied and is becoming increasingly feasible. However, such autonomous driving has yet to be achieved on public roads, because of various uncertainties due to surrounding human drivers and pedestrians. In this paper, we present an end-to-end learningbased autonomous driving system named SuperDriver AI, where Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) learn the driving actions and policies from the experienced human drivers and determine the driving maneuvers to take while guaranteeing road safety. In addition, to improve robustness and interpretability, we present a slit model and a visual attention module. We build a datacollection system and emulator with real-world hardware, and we also test the SuperDriver AI system with real-world driving scenarios. Finally, we have collected 150 runs for one driving scenario in Tokyo, Japan, and have shown the demonstration of SuperDriver AI with the real-world vehicle.

Just a few years ago, the promise seemed limitless: Automate cars and bring an end to traffic accidents, the biggest killer in the United States. Automate construction, with robot dozers, excavators, and other heavy machinery, and US housing and infrastructure shortfalls could be solved. Built Robotics began testing autonomous excavators in 2017 with the goal of training machines to do more on construction sites. At the time, CEO Noah Ready-Campbell predicted that fully autonomous equipment would become commonplace on construction sites before fully autonomous cars hit public roads. But after nearly seven years of digging trenches with autonomous excavators, Built Robotics last month announced plans to shift its focus from general construction projects to installation of solar farms.

For much of the past decade, Elon Musk has regularly voiced concerns about artificial intelligence, worrying that the technology could advance so rapidly that it creates existential risks for humanity. Though seemingly unrelated to his job making electric vehicles and rockets, Musk's A.I. Cassandra act has helped cultivate his image as a Silicon Valley seer, tapping into the science-fiction fantasies that lurk beneath so much of startup culture. Now, with A.I. taking center stage in the Valley's endless carnival of hype, Musk has signed on to a letter urging a moratorium on advanced A.I. development until "we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," seemingly cementing his image as a force for responsibility amid high technology run amok. Existential risks are central to Elon Musk's personal branding, with various Crichtonian scenarios underpinning his pitches for Tesla, SpaceX, and his computer-brain-interface company Neuralink. But not only are these companies' humanitarian "missions" empty marketing narratives with no real bearing on how they are run, Tesla has created the most immediate--and lethal--"A.I. risk" facing humanity right now, in the form of its driving automation.

Amazon-owned Zoox has started offering driverless robotaxi rides in California after receiving a testing permit from the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), the company announced. Unlike the autonomous vehicles from Cruise and Waymo, Zoox's vehicles are purpose built for driverless taxi rides, so they have no steering wheel or pedals. On February 11th, shortly after receiving the permit, Zoox conducted the "first run of its employee shuttle service in Foster City, California, marking the first time in history a purpose-built autonomous robotaxi without traditional driving controls carried passengers on open public roads," it wrote in a press release. To get to that point, the company completed what it called "rigorous" testing with the vehicles on private roads. It also ran its L3 test fleet (hybrid Toyota Highlanders with safety drivers) over a million autonomous miles on data-gathering missions in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Seattle.