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google car coming to texas

http://www.dallasnew.....g-cars.ece

KVR said
You need to pay extra for pedestrian detection?!?

https://youtu.be/_8nnhUCtcO8

A video showing a car attempting to park but actually plowing into journalists might have resulted from the Volvo’s owner not paying an extra fee to have the car avoid pedestrians.

The video, taken in the Dominican Republic, shows a Volvo XC60 reversing itself, waiting, and then driving back into pedestrians at speed. The horrifying pictures went viral and were presumed to have resulted from a malfunction with the car — but the car might not have had the ability to recognise a human at all.

The accident may have happened because owners have to pay for a special feature known as “pedestrian detection functionality”, which costs extra. The cars do have auto-braking features as standard, but only for avoiding other cars — if they are to avoid crashing into pedestrians, too, then owners must pay extra.

“It appears as if the car in this video is not equipped with Pedestrian detection,” Volvo spokesperson Johan Larsson told Fusion. “This is sold as a separate package.”

The feature uses a radar and camera to see pedestrians.

Even if the car had been fitted with such functionality, the driver would likely have overridden it because of the way they were driving, Larsson told Fusion.

http://www.independe.....77203.html

probably has NOTHING to do with this

Volvo says it will accept full liability for accidents involving its driverless cars, making it "one of the first" car companies to do so.

It joins Mercedes and also tech firm Google, who have made similar claims.

Volvo says it is trying to expedite regulation in the US, where "a patchwork" of rules is holding back the industry.

Uncertainty over liability for a driverless car crash is seen as one of the biggest barriers to adoption.

Why is Volvo doing this?

In a speech in Washington DC on Thursday, the president of Volvo Cars, Hakan Samuelsson, said that the US is currently "the most progressive country in the world in autonomous driving".

However, he believes it "risks losing its leading position" because of the lack of Federal guidelines for the "testing and certification" of autonomous vehicles.

Instead, car makers face inconsistent rules from state to state, which makes it harder to roll out their technology.

For instance, only a handful of US states such as California and Nevada allow the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads - and even then rules around certification vary.

Regulation is also slowed by unanswered ethical and legal concerns, particularly when it comes to liability for driverless car accidents.

And the situation is "even worse" in Europe, according to Volvo's chief technical officer, Erik Coelingh.

more http://www.bbc.com/n.....y-34475031

will be interesting to see how they figure this one out

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.

The glitch?

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?

more http://www.bloomberg.....a-key-flaw

Jeez, even bricklayers aren't safe

Construction workers on some sites are getting new, non-union help. SAM – short for semi-automated mason – is a robotic bricklayer being used to increase productivity as it works with human masons.

In this human-robot team, the robot is responsible for the more rote tasks: picking up bricks, applying mortar, and placing them in their designated location. A human handles the more nuanced activities, like setting up the worksite, laying bricks in tricky areas, such as corners, and handling aesthetic details, like cleaning up excess mortar.

Even in completing repetitive tasks, SAM still has to be fairly adaptable. It’s able to complete precise and level work while mounted on a scaffold that sways slightly in the wind. The robot can correct for the differences between theoretical building specifications and what’s actually on site, says Scott Peters, cofounder of Construction Robotics, a company based in Victor, New York, that designed SAM as its debut product.

“In construction, your design will say that a window is located exactly 30 feet from the corner of a building, and in reality when you get to the building, nothing is ever where it says it’s supposed to be,” Peters says. “Masons know how to adapt to that, so we had to design a robot that knows how to do that, too.”

In its current iteration, the system is best suited to work on large swaths of flat walls, most commonly found in projects for universities, hospitals, and other large sites. But some amount of detailed work isn’t beyond the system’s abilities. SAM can emblazon a company logo in brick on a wall, for instance, by following a pixelated map of the image. It can also bump bricks in or out by about half an inch, to create a textured look to a wall face.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times-as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/

https://youtu.be/OKoQMD0QZQs