Ford to launch robot cars in Washington
WASHINGTON: The black Ford Fusion hybrid with a tiara of laser sensors looped twice through a four-mile stretch of a changing Washington, passing a trendy food hall and a sagging strip mall as it vacuumed up data to build a citywide network of self- driving cars.
The map engineers inside last week were part of an advance team working with Ford, which plans to deploy a driverless fleet that will carry customers and make deliveries for businesses across all corners of the US capital.
Carmakers and technology companies touting safety and economic benefits from autonomous vehicles are racing to improve their systems and carve out real estate across the country, putting down stakes in cities from San Francisco to Boston as public proving grounds for technologies that remain distrusted by many.
Ford will begin testing selfdriving cars in the District of Columbia early next year and plans to launch commercially in Washington, Miami and other unnamed cities starting in 2021. That’s a longer timeline than some other firms and communities, a reality leaders from Ford and the city both described as beneficial.
“We realised very quickly that we can launch a small number of cars in an area right away - but then not create a healthy business that helps the city,” said Sherif Marakby, president and chief executive of Ford Autonomous Vehicles.
Waymo, the company formed out of Google’s nearly decadeold self- driving car project, is already carrying selected families and transit employees
We realised very quickly that we can launch a small number of cars in an area right away - but then not create a healthy business that helps the city. Sherif Marakby, president and chief executive of Ford Autonomous Vehicles
in self- driving minivans in the Phoenix area, along with safety chaperones in the back seat. The company said it plans to open a driverless service to the public in parts of Arizona by year’s end.
Brian Kenner, the District of Columbia’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said he’s pleased “frankly, to not be the tip of the spear, full on, in autonomous vehicles.”
District officials met with counterparts from Pittsburgh and representatives from Uber, as part of a multi- city effort to share experiences, Kenner said. After a driverless Uber killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March, both Pittsburgh and Uber “have taken at least a half step back” in their aggressive push to see the technology deployed, he added.
“We appreciate being sort of in the 2.0 wave around this,” Kenner said.
Federal policy on driverless vehicles has been largely laissezfaire. There are no federal safety standards for the technology or requirements that companies certify, via third parties or on their own, that their self- driving systems are safe.
Carmakers and tech companies have pushed Congress to bar states and localities from regulating self- driving cars themselves, saying they need to stop a “patchwork” of regulations that would stymie innovation.
Ford said the District of Columbia’s openness to driverless operations gave Washington an advantage over other less-welcoming cities.
Current city law requires a backup safety driver in autonomous cars, though officials said they would work, in coordination with Ford, to update those and other rules.
Ford will employ the same rigour the company has used over the past century to ensure that its driverless technology is safe, Marakby said.
Last week, the mapping specialists from Argo AI, a self- driving start-up that Ford is backing with a US$ 1 billion investment, drove the autonomous Ford Fusion, in manual mode, through Northeast Washington.
With air blasting to keep the computers cool, they drove through a treacherous fiveprong intersection known as the Starburst that includes a streetcar line.
Using nine cameras and a pair of lidar units, which make precise measurements using laser beams, they recorded roads, curbs and streetlights, as well as an electric Jump bike buzzing down a sidewalk and a jack- o-lantern snowman swaying in a rowhouse yard.
It was like capturing a snow globe of data each moment they moved through the city. All those 3-D snapshots will be refined, augmented and used by the driverless car to place itself in the world.
Making sure it does so safely will depend on the work of people like Patrick Gray, a programme manager at Argo AI, who said he sometimes looks through the windshield and sees an array of digital data points rather than the steel- and- concrete scene outside.
“It changes your perception of the world when you start understanding the way a robot car sees the world - and then how you would translate the human world to a world that the car could understand,” Gray said. “Definitely my wife hates me now, because all I do is point out weird traffic lights and interesting lane geometries. She’s just like, ‘I don’t care about that.’ “— Washington Post.