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According to Digital Trends (This article and its images were originally posted on Digital Trends June 30, 2018 at 05:25AM.)
With approximately 2,800 stores in 35 states, autonomous delivery service isn’t Kroger’s first tech foray. In 2017 the chain tested product scanning in the supermarket aisles to save shoppers time in checkout lines.
Autonomous grocery delivery buggies may roam U.S. neighborhoods if Kroger’s pilot program works out. The largest American supermarket chain announced a partnership with Mountain View-based Nuro this week to test the concept of driverless home deliveries. The pilot will start this fall in an as-yet-unnamed market.
Nuro applies robotics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision technology in partnership with local businesses looking for innovative ways to deliver goods that are cost effective for merchants and convenient for customers.
“We are incredibly excited about the potential of our innovative partnership with Nuro to bring the future of grocery delivery to customers today,” says Yael Cosset, Kroger’s chief digital officer. “As part of Restock Kroger, we have already started to redefine the grocery customer experience and expand the coverage area for our anything, anytime and anywhere offering. Partnering with Nuro, a leading technology company, will create customer value by providing Americans access to fast and convenient delivery at a fair price.”
Customers in the pilot will place same-day delivery orders using Kroger’s existing ClickList online ordering system. With ClickList, a delivery driver receives the customer’s name, phone number, and delivery address once the order is ready. In the test program, however, the customer’s information will be passed to Nuro’s app.
Nuro’s fully-electric, unmanned four-wheeled vehicles have two separate locking sections. Depending on their size, grocery orders will be placed in one or both of the secured holding areas. Customers will access the compartments to retrieve their products using smartphone codes they received when they placed their orders.
Shaped roughly like a toaster, with cameras and sensors mounted on a lateral arch on the roof, the Nuro weighs about 1,500 pounds. Mounted beneath the floor, the battery pack and electric motors account for most of the weight. Nuro states the vehicle is nearly 40 inches wide, but doesn’t publish the length. The interior compartments are rated to carry a combined cargo weight of up to 243 pounds, Nuro says.
“Unmanned delivery will be a game-changer for local commerce, and together with Kroger, we’re thrilled to test this new delivery experience to bring grocery customers new levels of convenience and value,” said Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder, Nuro. “Our safe, reliable, and affordable service, combined with Kroger’s ubiquitous brand, is a powerful first step in our mission to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life.”
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This article and images were originally posted on [Digital Trends] June 30, 2018 at 05:25AM. Credit to Author Bruce Brown and Digital Trends | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day.
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According to The Next Web
2017 was an exciting year for driverless cars: from Waymo testing driverless cars on city streets for the first time, to the UK Government’s plans to launch driverless cars onto the roads in 2021, in the past twelve months we’ve seen faster development of driverless car technology than ever before.
This year could be even more exciting. However, in order to maintain momentum, we need to tackle one issue head on: training technical talent.
Limitless potential, limited talent pool
Self-driving cars have the potential to change the world in ways we haven’t yet fully realized. This untapped potential is what got me into a career in autonomous vehicles in the first place. The way that we build our roads, organize our travel and move about in our cities will change forever, and, I think, for the better.
One not-so-small problem: very few people know how to program driverless cars. A self-driving car integrates multiple types of highly-complex technology: automotive engineering, software expertise, statistics and probability, machine learning, mathematics, and more. Successful self-driving car engineers have a combination of very specific (and often rare) skill sets.
The driverless skills gap
Countries around the world are suffering from a digital skills gap. The British Chambers of Commerce found that three in four UK businesses report a digital skills shortage among their employees, while in the US the National Federation of Independent Business reports that 45 percent of small businesses were unable to find qualified applicants to fill job openings.
The problem is supply and demand: the demand for the technical skills that make great self-driving car engineers is growing much faster than the supply of capable engineers. Traditional educational institutions — schools, universities and vocational colleges — sometimes struggle to keep up with the pace of change in the private sector, and their curriculums can sometimes lag behind the times as a result…
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This article and images were originally posted on [The Next Web] January 20, 2018 at 09:33AM. Credit to Author and The Next Web | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
the government is also planning to introduce and make GPS and satellite tracking mandatory in all public and private vehicles.
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According to Tech2
Union minister Nitin Gadkari today said driverless cars will not be allowed in India as it will lead to joblessness. The road transport minister further said that instead the government will focus on training drivers as adequate driving skills can provide employment to about 50 lakh people. “We will not allow driver-less cars in India. India suffers a huge shortage of 22 lakh drivers…Cab aggregators take advantage of these. We are not going to promote any technology or policy that will render people jobless,” Gadkari said.
He said the government is planning to introduce a cab aggregator platform where commuters could choose any mode of transportation like electric four-wheeler taxis or two- wheelers. The government will only be a facilitator in this but the platform will bring in more competition and help commuters to have affordable public transportation, he said. Also, he said that the government will promote electric vehicles but would not allow its imports and rather would urge all major automobile companies to manufacture this as per Make in India drive.
Stanford scientists have created a device that wirelessly transmits electricity to a movable disc. The technology could some day be used to charge moving electric vehicles and personal devices. Credit: Sid Assawaworrarit/Stanford University
If electric cars could recharge while driving down a highway, it would virtually eliminate concerns about their range and lower their cost, perhaps making electricity the standard fuel for vehicles.
Now Stanford University scientists have overcome a major hurdle to such a future by wirelessly transmitting electricity to a nearby moving object. Their results are published in the June 15 edition of Nature.
“In addition to advancing the wireless charging of vehicles and personal devices like cellphones, our new technology may untether robotics in manufacturing, which also are on the move,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the study. “We still need to significantly increase the amount of electricity being transferred to charge electric cars, but we may not need to push the distance too much more.”
The group built on existing technology developed in 2007 at MIT for transmitting electricity wirelessly over a distance of a few feet to a stationary object. In the new work, the team transmitted electricity wirelessly to a moving LED lightbulb. That demonstration only involved a 1-milliwatt charge, whereas electric cars often require tens of kilowatts to operate. The team is now working on greatly increasing the amount of electricity that can be transferred, and tweaking the system to extend the transfer distance and improve efficiency.
Driving range
Wireless charging would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. Tesla Motors expects its upcoming Model 3 to go more than 200 miles on a single charge and the Chevy Bolt, which is already on the market, has an advertised range of 238 miles. But electric vehicle batteries generally take several hours to fully recharge. A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations.
“In theory, one could drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to stop to recharge,” Fan explained. “The hope is that you’ll be able to charge your electric car while you’re driving down the highway. A coil in the bottom of the vehicle could receive electricity from a series of coils connected to an electric current embedded in the road.”
Some transportation experts envision an automated highway system where driverless electric vehicles are wirelessly charged by solar power or other renewable energy sources. The goal would be to reduce accidents and dramatically improve the flow of traffic while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
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Wireless technology could also assist GPS navigation of driverless cars. GPS is accurate up to about 35 feet. For safety, autonomous cars need to be in the center of the lane where the transmitter coils would be embedded, providing very precise positioning for GPS satellites.
Magnetic resonance
Mid-range wireless power transfer, as developed at Stanford and other research universities, is based on magnetic resonance coupling. Just as major power plants generate alternating currents by rotating coils of wire between magnets, electricity moving through wires creates an oscillating magnetic field. This field also causes electrons in a nearby coil of wires to oscillate, thereby transferring power wirelessly. The transfer efficiency is further enhanced if both coils are tuned to the same magnetic resonance frequency and are positioned at the correct angle.
However, the continuous flow of electricity can only be maintained if some aspects of the circuits, such as the frequency, are manually tuned as the object moves. So, either the energy transmitting coil and receiver coil must remain nearly stationary, or the device must be tuned automatically and continuously – a significantly complex process.
To address the challenge, the Stanford team eliminated the radio-frequency source in the transmitter and replaced it with a commercially available voltage amplifier and feedback resistor. This system automatically figures out the right frequency for different distances without the need for human interference.
“Adding the amplifier allows power to be very efficiently transferred across most of the three-foot range and despite the changing orientation of the receiving coil,” said graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit, the study’s lead author. “This eliminates the need for automatic and continuous tuning of any aspect of the circuits.”
Assawaworrarit tested the approach by placing an LED bulb on the receiving coil. In a conventional setup without active tuning, LED brightness would diminish with distance. In the new setup, the brightness remained constant as the receiver moved away from the source by a distance of about three feet. Fan’s team recently filed a patent application for the latest advance.
The group used an off-the-shelf, general-purpose amplifier with a relatively low efficiency of about 10 percent. They say custom-made amplifiers can improve that efficiency to more than 90 percent.
“We can rethink how to deliver electricity not only to our cars, but to smaller devices on or in our bodies,” Fan said. “For anything that could benefit from dynamic, wireless charging, this is potentially very important.”
More information:
Sid Assawaworrarit et al. Robust wireless power transfer using a nonlinear parity?time-symmetric circuit, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22404
For a short three blocks in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, you can take a free ride on a self-driving bus.
The tiny, fully electric vehicle, called Arma, was developed by Paris-based driverless and electric technologies startup Navya. It holds just 15 people—11 seated, four standing—and shuttles along a 0.2-mile route on Fremont Street between 8th Street and Las Vegas Boulevard. Its Jan. 11 debut marked the first time a driverless bus had transported passengers along public US roads.
The driverless shuttle route in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Google Maps)
Rides are free and open to the public for a test period, which runs until Jan. 20, from 10am to 7pm local time on weekdays and with modified hours on the weekend. The shuttle does not turn around but rather simply reverses course when it reaches the end of its route, making it more like the city’s existing Monorail system than a traditional bus. Las Vegas has closed part of Fremont Street to other traffic for the time being, said Margaret Kurtz, a city spokeswoman.
Riders who enter the bus won’t see any traditional controls, like a steering wheel or brakes. Instead, there’s a touch-screen tablet that displays information about the vehicle’s route and an emergency stop button anyone can press, said Francis Julien, general manager of Las Vegas operations for Keolis, a transit company that is partnering with Navya on the trial run. The bus has a designated safety driver who mostly fills a customer service role. It can travel at up to 30mph but has a capped speed of 16mph on Fremont Street, Julien said. When the bus isn’t running its pre-programmed route, operators can steer it using an Xbox controller.
Navya’s Arma is already on roads in six other countries: Switzerland, France, Singapore, Qatar, Australia, and New Zealand. It costs about €250,000 (around $266,000) and currently must be purchased with a five-year service and maintenance contract, which runs another €200,000 (about $213,000), said Martin Higgins, a company spokesman. Julien said he expects to have “extended” tests of Navya’s shuttles in other US cities.
The dry-run in Las Vegas began days after the city finished hosting the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Navya showed off its driverless bus during the conference, but waited until the following week to begin a test on public roads. In 2011, Nevada became the first US state to authorize the operation of autonomous vehicles, with certain restrictions. The state’s regulatory credibility was weakened this summer by a regulatory spat with Otto, a self-driving trucking company acquired in August by Uber.
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Mercedes-Benz wants to completely change your bus-riding experience.
In July, the auto company unveiled its vision for the aptly named Future Bus — a semi-autonomous bus that successfully completed a 12-mile route that included traffic lights, tunnels, and navigating around pedestrians.
To create the future bus, Mercedes-Benz built upon its platform for autonomous trucks to create a system optimized for buses dubbed City Pilot. It uses camera systems, radar sensors, and GPS to navigate safely.
But even though the Future Bus has autonomous features, Mercedes does not plan on releasing a fully driverless Future Bus.
“Driverless buses are not currently legally possible on public roads. Furthermore, this is not our aim,” Andreas Mink, director of engineering electronics for the bus project, told Business Insider via email. “On the contrary, the driver’s job involves a lot of responsibility, and we want to make this job as easy as we can rather than do away with it.”
The interior of the Future Bus.Mercedes-Benz
Where Mercedes really is pushing the envelope with its driverless bus is with its interior design that’s composed of three different areas. The central area is called the “express zone” and is a reserved space for standing passengers that have a short trip ahead. In the back there is a “lounge zone” for people who have longer trips ahead, and then there’s a “service zone” near the driver where passengers can look up information.
Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving.
It might not seem like a lot, but in terms of comparative datasets for highway driving out there, it is. And it’s what Hotz used to build the initial successful self-driving demo used to ferry Bloomberg around for comma.ai’s big public debut.
“When I started this project, I didn’t want to have to put things in cars – I just wanted to play with the machine learning,” explained Hotz in an interview. “But I looked around and there was no good source of data to do that.”
“There is not a good highway dataset to replicate what we had in Bloomberg and what we had in Nvidia, and I think it’s time that the whole world should be able to do this,” Hotz explained.
This doesn’t mean just anyone can take comma.ai’s data and turn their 1998 Ford Tempo into a self-driving superstar – but it’s a starting point. Comma.ai did not open source what they’re using to drive their test car, and the dataset represents where the company was at in terms of total data as of around six months ago; the company has obviously gathered more in the intervening time.
“I believe in being as open as possible without killing the host organism; we make sure we keep the company alive to open source more stuff,” Hotz told me about comma.ai’s approach to making their sets available to the general public. “There were a lot of missteps along the way to get this sort of data – no one needs to repeat them.”
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