Sunday, March 31, 2013
Another Senseless Avoidable Tragedy: Princeton crash leaves one person dead, two with life-threatening injuries. The 30,000+ yearly US roadway deaths are but a grim statistic until one is a friend or loved one. Then it hits home like a ton of bricks. It is even more tragic when one realizesthat existing inexpensive technologies, like thosesummarized in these pages,could have intervened and prevented, or at least diminished the severity, of this accident. A BMW, with a young man in the driver’s seat, traveling on a residential street posted as a school zone, crashed head-on into an unoccupied car parked on the other side of the on-coming lane. The crumbled carscontinued into a 3rd car parked in a driveway killing one of its occupants and severely injuring the other. Everyone in the community is devastated, as am I, not only because I know and revered both, but also because this is a perfect example of an accident that market-ready technologies could have prevented. The automotive research community has developed technologies that can keep cars in their lane of travel, can sense in a timely manner impending collisions and warn the driver to brake. Most importantly, if the driver fails to apply sufficient brake force, the technology will tighten the seat belts and automaticallyincrease the brake force to avoid, or at leastreduce the severity, of the collision. It is imperative that each of us do all we can to accelerate the availability and market acceptance of these technologies so that we can begin to put an end to such tragedies. It is essentially a certainty, that each so equipped car will not allow a driver to cause this kind of carnage: 1 dead, 2 seriously injured, one charged with death by auto. All senseless and technologically avoidable!
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Calendar of Events: The Premier Road Vehicle Automation Event in North America. Transportation Research Board’s premier multidiscipilary research and policy conference focused on Road vehicle Automation will take place at Stanford University on July 16-19, 2013. If you are actively involved in road vehicle automation and would like to actively contribute to the success of this conference by becoming a patron please contact me at .
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Is Technology Making Us Safer? their perspectives and forecasts for future in-car technology and autonmous vehicles inc.NHTSA Chief David Strickland.
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On Wednesday, April 10 @ 14:15 I will be speaking on “ Impact of Driverless Cars on the Future of Airports”, and on Thursday, April 11 @ 16:00 I will be making a presentation in 101 Sherrered to the ITE Met section on “Smart Driving Cars:Where Are We Going? Why Are We Going? Where Are We Now?How Might We Get There? Where might We End Up? Implications for ITE and how it can help.”
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TRB Webinar: Guidelines for the Use of Mobile LIDAR in Transportation Applications, April 11, 2013.
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2013 Annual Mtg., Nashville, TN, April 22-24.Amazingly little about SafeDrivingCars. Doesn’t seem to be on board.
From the Public Sector: Request for Information(RfI) from US DoT onSurface Transportation System Automation. Please provide your input to many very deep research questions. Deadline:Tue. April 23 @ noon. My response will be at
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Smart Driving Cars
Monday, March 25, 2013
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Smart Driving Cars
Monday, March 18, 2013
European Update: Workshop: Automation in Road Transport (contains links to participants & presentations)
….As background if you haven’t read it: from June 29,2011: Definition of necessary vehicle and infrastructure systems for Automated DrivingFinal report SMART 2010/0064
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Smart Driving Cars
Monday, March 11, 2013
Best videos from Workshop: Automation in Road Transport (contains links to participants & presentations)
Automated Steering Avoidance of imminent collision on Frozen Lake done Feb 23, 2013. Views outside the vehicle of automated collision avoidance maneuvers involving only steering (no differential wheel braking. Views from outside the vehicles:
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Smart Driving Cars
Monday, March 4, 2013
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Smart Driving Cars
Thursday, February 28, 2013
This is BIG!!!
Continental and BMW Group Working Together to Develop Freeway-Grade Highly Automated Driving
BMW Press Release Continental Press Release
This is BIG, not only because they have “an agreement to jointly develop an electronic co-pilot for this purpose”,but because…
- it aligns a component supplier with a manufacturer. Where does this leave Daimler and VW/Audi? To join up with Bosch?? What about Delphi? Join back with GM on this one?? Where does this leave the other manufacturers; will they align? The competitive race to attract consumers to the showroom has really heated up.
- They’ve realized that safety is now clothed in comfort & convenience. Together, they make a powerful message to the car buying public. This technology will draw people into the showrooms. The wake-up call was delivered by the emergent competitor, , rather than government edicts or rule-makings. “… [I]n capitalist reality…, it is not [price] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology…- competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.” Joseph A Shumpeter(1883-1950)
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Smart Driving Cars
Thursday, February 21, 2013
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Smart Driving Cars
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Smart Driving Cars
Friday, February 8, 2013
Smart Driving Cars
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Smart Driving Cars
Thursday, January 31, 2013