Robotic Prius takes itself for a spin around SF
A robotic, autonomous Prius takes to the road early one morning in San Francisco last week.
(Credit: 510 Systems)An unusual motorcade made its way across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge early one morning last week: a silver Toyota Prius, complete with police escort and camera crew, but with no driver at the wheel.
The robotic Prius was the invention of Anthony Levandowski, 28, a computer engineer who lives in San Francisco, works in Silicon Valley, and built the so-called "Pribot" in his spare time.
"Some people like to work on hot rods, boats, or airplanes," Levandowski said afterward. "I love robots."
Pribot's real-world test started on September 7 at Pier 7, a nondescript slice of San Francisco's often-foggy waterfront, around 7:30 a.m. The autonomous vehicle drove along the Embarcadero, took a right on Harrison Street, turned onto the bridge itself, and exited at Treasure Island.
The result? Years of hard work paid off. No little old ladies were run off the road. Pribot's trek, Levandowski said, took place without incident, save the car scraping its left side as it drove up the ramp exiting the Bay Bridge.
This was far from his first experiment with self-guided vehicles. As a student at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, Levandowski was part of a graduate student team that created a robotic motorcycle called Ghostrider to enter DARPA's Grand Challenge.
'Pribot' did have a police escort, true, but it nevertheless managed to make its way along San Francisco's Embarcadero en route to the Bay Bridge.
(Credit: 510 Systems)It was an ambitious effort (two-wheel vehicles can be unstable at low speeds, and Ghostrider was weighed down with a hefty load of electronics). And it proved to be too clunky, or perhaps too pioneering, to win the DARPA contest. Ghostrider toppled over early on and couldn't get up.
But the experience did cement Levandowski's interest in self-guided vehicles. After graduation, he worked at 510 Systems, a Berkeley company that builds and sells computer systems used in machine control and robotics. (Trivia: 510 was involved in processing laser-scanned imagery for Radiohead's "House of Cards" video; the raw 3D image data has been posted on code.google.com.)
In preparation for last week's 25-minute drive, Levandowski drove the route in advance a few days before, scanning the surroundings with a pulsed laser. "We built a precise map of what the area downtown looks like," he said.
That's what Pribot used to navigate the course. More precisely, the 'bot relied on a combination of GPS, inertial guidance, and a pair of infrared lasers that scanned its surroundings and compared its location with the previously built 3D map. The lasers are rated Class 1, meaning they're so low-power that they're safe if they shine into a human eye.
Building the 3D model of San Francisco's waterfront is even more complicated than it sounds, mostly because so much can change. Cars move. Scaffolding can change a building's appearance. Pedestrians will probably not be in the same place days later. The solution is a probabilistic approach: "You build a map, you assume it's true to a certain confidence interval," Levandowski said.
Normal GPS signals might be precise enough for human drivers who need accuracy down to, say, a radius of tens of meters. That's enough to know what street you're driving on or how far away the nearest Starbucks is.
Yet because robotic vision remains nowhere near as flexible as human eyesight, 'bots need more accuracy than GPS can generally deliver. Levandowski found a solution in the RTK base station sold by Topcon, a Pribot sponsor, which typically sells to farmers aiming to do carefully aimed seeding and fertilizing. RTK boasts an accuracy of one inch or less, as long as the base station is no more than 3 to 6 miles away.
Pribot's morning bridge crossing will air on an upcoming episode of Prototype This!, a new Discovery Channel show that will debut on October 15, and which is being made on San Francisco's Treasure Island by Beyond Productions. Discovery describes it as a way "to experience firsthand as inventions come to life."
Although Levandowski works in Mountain View, Calif., as an engineer for Google, he stresses that this project is unrelated to his employer. He created his own company for this venture--with its own what-if-the-robot-squashes-a-human liability insurance, of course--called Anthony's Robots, which was registered with the state of California in June.
The drive from San Francisco to Mountain View on U.S. 101 is 40 miles. During rush hour it can be a miserable inching-along commute, comparable to the worst that Washington, D.C.'s Beltway or Philadelphia's Schuylkill Expressway can offer.
It was frustration born of that drive (and similar experiences on other SF-area freeways) that gave birth to Pribot. "I commute a lot," Levandowski said. "It's really stressful...If I could be more productive and be safer, while doing that, that's (better). I'm an engineer. I like tackling hard problems and solving them."
Automotive technology is already moving in this direction, of course. Some current models in Nissan's Infiniti lineup offer lane departure prevention, which uses sensors to monitor lane markings, sound an audible alert when drifting is detected, and gently apply selected brakes to nudge the vehicle back into the proper lane. Lexus and Volvo offer similar systems.
If cars already are smart enough to do that, why not give a 'bot even more control of a car, at least in stop-and-go traffic? Levandowski thinks an aftermarket kit will be available within three years to do just that. "It will keep you in the lane that you're in, gently steer left or steer right, follow the curves, and pace itself against the vehicle in front of you," he said.
"The technology for being able to improve your convenience and safety while on the freeway is just around the corner," he added. "I want to be the one to provide that."
Camera crews from Prototype This!, a new Discovery Channel show created by Beyond Productions, film 'Pribot' driving itself on a pre-planned course through San Francisco.
(Credit: 510 Systems)
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
Imagine a park parallel button.
I like to drive my car and don?t need it telling me I am going to fast or taking over if it does not like how I am driving. If it is like traction control and you can turn it completely off ok.
As for the fact that each time the laser map is created it is different, why not combine each map? Look for the permanent features, those that are unchanged, and those that have moved or are not longer there. As you do more and more passes over an area ( AKA as more automated cars drive that road) the precision would grow. Obviously this would have to have exceptions because "permanent" features can change too, such as after roadwork. Just a thought, probably already thought of if not implemented, but hey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1gO1QiBLmo&feature=related
Could you imagine this thing riding down the street and impacting a bicycle rider at a stop sign? Things like that are the reason this will never go anywhere.
What I'd rather see is robotic controls over the basic things. One thing that I can't stand is when people drift lanes without signaling. Little things where it could mean avoiding an accident. I like the manual signaling, but for some people, they just need some automation or something since they're just too lazy.
This appears designed to impress those persons not understanding robotics. This car did not "DRIVE ITSELF" any more than those inexpensive robotic starter kits where a small motorized vehicle follows a line!!
The car appears to have made NO DECISIONS, as the builder and demonstrator had the course pre-mapped for the vehicle to follow without the robot doing any thinking!
Were there any stop signs or traffic signals? They were not mentioned in the article.
Did the robot have to make ANY DECISIONS???? I do not think so, or it would have been mentioned.
I do not see any breakthroughs here, other than a person can program a larger than scale model to follow a preprogrammed course that requires no decisions nor deviations.
I think this designer is far from any prototype that a "real" person would allow such a robot to transport them anywhere.
Sure the controls of the car have been under the control of a micro-processor, and that is pretty neat, as long as there is an interface to put a "REAL AI ROBOT" in the car to drive.
There would be no way that any car of this proto design would even come close to anyone using it, as the article itself said that everything had been designed as a 3-D map that the car MUST FOLLOW without deviation.
Sorry, but whenever something that appear to be Artificial Intelligence cannot be so, if all the answers are already programmed into the firmware or software. In order to truly demonstrate an AI (robot) controlled car, then the car should have been equipped with the same information that a human has available and let the car demonstrate that it can analyze and go from point A to point B without someone having to make detailed 3-D maps for it to follow.
I see AI as an entity that can make decisions from information available to a human and arrive at the same or equivalent conclusion as a human may under the same conditions.
A nice piece of propaganda for the ill-informed, but that is all this demonstration proved, nothing more.
Take out the map information and tell the car to run the same course ---- THEN you have something!
I will let it use GPS and the same tools available to any other HUMAN ... Sure it can have all the sensors it wants, but ONLY the same information as a HUMAN would have available.
- by ralahinn1 September 19, 2008 12:24 PM PDT
- Lol, anyone remember the "Johnny Cab" in "Total Recall?
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(17 Comments)http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y75/fffangirl/jc1.jpg