July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Self-driving cars are all very well and good, but what if you are not ready to give up the driver’s seat? Gimlet Systems offers an alternative: a car copilot that not only avoids collisions but can train you to be a better driver. Its makers expect a similar system to be in on the road within a decade.

“Google is focusing on full automation of the driving experience, making the vehicle drive itself without human interaction, ” says Sterling Anderson, the cofounder of Gimlet Systems. “Gimlet is an intelligent combination of both human and vehicle, an invisible copilot that is adaptive to the driver’s needs.” The system can either run in the background and come to life to avoid collisions or drive autonomously if the driver is incapacitated or wants to zone out. In testing with real human drivers, Gimlet reduced collisions by between 78 percent and 100 percent. 

A copilot wouldn’t just make drivers safer but also reduce fuel costs and congestion. Many safety features, which make vehicles larger or heavier, could be removed if cars were no longer in danger of crashing. Collision-proof vehicles can also be packed more tightly into roadways, avoiding the need to build more roads.

How does it work? Any intelligent vehicle control system is designed to preemptively avoid hazards in the environment so it needs to know where those hazards are, or will be, in the near future. A laser-based range finding unit (lidar), which looks like a spinning tin can on the top of the vehicle, works with cameras, radar, and some infra-red sensing to construct a map of the environment.

Using this map, Gimlet monitors and predicts the vehicle’s motion and determines how safe it is. If there is any adjustment to be made, the system’s logic-based algorithms determines the adjustment behind the scenes by sending commands to the accelerator or steering or braking system to avoid an accident.

Gimlet’s makers want to improve the driver’s performance even when he is not using the copilot. “We want to preserve the driver’s intuition about how the vehicle will respond. For that reason we provide a number of different feedback mechanisms. One is haptic, applying a feedback torque to the driver’s steering wheel.” This avoids the situation where the driver doesn’t even know he is making a mistake because the copilot corrects the vehicle’s motion without giving feedback. 

Test drivers grew quite fond of their copilots. 20 drivers performed 1,200 trials, driving a utility vehicle remotely using a video feed and the copilot. “We surveyed the drivers at the end of each day of testing. When they began the tests most drivers didn’t trust the system,”Anderson explained. “By the end of testing they were reporting that they felt more in control of the vehicle with the copilot’s help, than they did without it.” 

Its military applications look promising. “The number one cause of non-combat fatalities in the U.S. Military is vehicle crashes,” says Anderson. “It’s a serious cause of death even in combat, when soldiers are under duress.” If soldiers could drive supply convoys or perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions remotely, they would avoid risks like IEDs, saving many lives. 

Google confirms to VentureBeat it has just been granted a patent for its futuristic driverless cars.

This specific patent covers “methods and devices for transitioning a mixed-mode autonomous vehicle from a human driven mode to an autonomously driven mode,” that is, cars that can go from being human-controlled to being driven and controlled by embedded computers and sensors.

Using sensors, the vehicle could dock at a landing strip, then it would be able to get directions or driving instructions from the Internet via a URL, a QR code or a radio link.

After downloading driving instructions, the car would then switch into autonomous driving mode and execute the instructions, i.e., get you from point A to point B while you smoke your pipe or read the Financial Times — whatever floats your boat, Professor.

Google has a few prototypes of these vehicles out on the road right now — we saw one when we were last at the Google campus, as a matter of fact. To date, the only accident that has occurred involving a Google driverless car was due to, ah, user error.

The cars were first announced last October. At that time, the small fleet had already covered 140,000 miles of road, including the Golden Gate Bridge and parts of Hollywood Boulevard.

Earlier this year, the company lobbied Nevada to allow self-driving cars in the state, where they could perform automated deliveries and serve as self-driving taxis in Las Vegas, for example.

With this patent and its forward momentum on the driverless cars, Google seems determined to make this futuristic dream a reality in short order.

Currently, Google confirms that seven of the cars are in operation.

Thrun, who is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google’s Street View service, said that the company’s goal is to prevent traffic accidents, give people more free time, and reduce carbon emissions by changing the way people use their cars.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last week at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco that he believed self-driving cars would eventually do a better job of driving than people. While some may have considered his vision to be a far off work of science fiction, today’s announcement proves that self-driving technology is already here — and apparently it works very well.

The automated cars — which are manned by trained operators — have covered over 140,000 miles so far with occasional human control, the New York Times reports. Seven cars have driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention at all. They’ve traveled from Google’s Mountain View offices to its Santa Monica location and on to Hollywood Boulevard. “They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe,” Thrun writes.

The cars use radar sensors, video cameras, and a laser range finder which helps them detect other traffic. They also take advantage of detailed maps, which are collected by Google’s manually driven vehicles. The company is working with engineers who’ve taken part in the DARPA Challenges — autonomous vehicle races put together by the U.S. government. Thrun himself led the Stanford team to win the 2005 Darpa Challenge with their Stanley automated car.

Thrun believes that Google’s automated cars could potentially cut the 1.2 million lives lost every in road accidents (according to the World Health Organization) in half. He’s confident that the cars will reduce car usage, change the shape of car sharing, and create new “highway trains of tomorrow.” “These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads,” he wrote.

The project is certainly a major new step into robotics for Google, although the company doesn’t yet know how it will create a business from the automated cars. Google may be able to sell its information and navigation services to autonomous vehicle makers, or it might sell or give away the navigation technology itself, according to the New York Times.

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