Uber

THE SAFETY DRIVER behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber that  struck and killed a woman in 2018 has been charged with a crime. Prosecutors in Maricopa County, Arizona, Tuesday said the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, has been indicted for criminal negligence. But Uber, her employer and the company that built the automated system involved in the fatal collision, won’t face charges. The attorney for neighboring Yavapai County declined to prosecute Uber last year, writing in a letter that the office found... [Lire la suite]

Uber self-driving cars are back testing on San Francisco streets Advanced Technologies Group has resumed testing autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, two years after the company scaled back its testing program following a fatal crash in Arizona that killed a pedestrian. Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit is tiptoeing back into testing its autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. Uber ATG ended all testing on public roads after one of its vehicles struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in the Phoenix... [Lire la suite]

Silicon Valley is winning the race to build the first driverless cars Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car. The late 1800s saw a flurry of innovation by hundreds of companies battling to deliver on the promise of fast, efficient and reasonably-priced mechanical transportation. Ford later came to dominate the industry thanks to the development of the moving assembly line. Today the sector is poised for another breakthrough with the advent of cars that drive themselves. But unlike the original wave of automobile innovation, the... [Lire la suite]

It’s 2020. Where are our self-driving cars? In the age of AI advances, self-driving cars turned out to be harder than people expected.   When it comes to self-driving cars, the future was supposed to be now. In 2020, you’ll be a “permanent backseat driver,” the Guardian predicted in 2015. “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020,” blared a Business Insider headline from 2016. Those declarations were accompanied by announcements from General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Toyota,... [Lire la suite]

Uber’s Self-Driving Car Didn’t Know Pedestrians Could Jaywalk The software inside the Uber self-driving SUV that killed an Arizona woman last year was not designed to detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, according to new documents released as part of a federal investigation into the incident. That’s the most damning revelation in a trove of new documents related to the crash, but other details indicate that, in a variety of ways, Uber’s self-driving tech failed to consider how humans actually... [Lire la suite]

Uber is bringing its self-driving cars to Dallas Uber will begin testing its self-driving cars in Dallas, Texas in November, the company announced Tuesday. The vehicles will be operated by human drivers in downtown Dallas to start out, collecting mapping data and capturing driving scenarios which Uber’s engineers will then reproduce in simulation. This doesn’t mean Uber is planning to offer trips in its self-driving cars or even perform self-driving tests in Dallas. “The data we collect will inform our next steps — we may not look... [Lire la suite]

Uber to set up its own artificial intelligence lab Uber has aquired a machine learning company and set up a new division dedicated to research in AI.  Uber AI Labs will be based in San Francisco and its initial core will be formed ofthe team of 15 from recently acquired Geometric Intelligence, an AI research startup.  Machine learning will be central to Uber's mission of using tech to "negotiate the real world", the company said.  "It manifests in myriad ways, from determining an optimal route... [Lire la suite]

Rethinking GPS: Engineering Next-Gen Location at Uber Location and navigation using global positioning systems (GPS) is deeply embedded in our daily lives, and is particularly crucial to Uber’s services. To orchestrate quick, efficient pickups, our GPS technologies need to know the locations of matched riders and drivers, as well as provide navigation guidance from a driver’s current location to where the rider needs to be picked up, and then, to the rider’s chosen destination. For this process to work seamlessly, the... [Lire la suite]

Uber planned on running 13,000 self-driving taxis by 2019 According to court documents unsealed last week, Uber envisioned running 75,000 autonomous vehicles in commercial applications across a geographic spread of 13 cities – all by 2022. These extrapolations date back to 2016, and are part of the cache of documents that have been submitted by Walter Bratic as an expert witness to rebut Waymo’s valuation claims for the economic damages that it incurred due to a trade secret theft. Waymo had accused its former engineer Anthony... [Lire la suite]

Here are Elon Musk’s wildest predictions about Tesla’s self-driving cars Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a series of bold predictions today about the ability for his company’s cars to completely drive themselves. And Musk thinks it will happen sooner than most of his competitors — perhaps as soon as the end of this year. Musk made the comments at an invitation-only event for investors at Tesla’s Palo Alto-headquarters, laying out a near-future vision in which self-driving Teslas vehicles compete with the likes of Waymo, GM, and... [Lire la suite]