Lifeboat Foundation

A.I. is yet to prove the safety of self-driving cars.

“Shortly following the accident, we informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board that the vehicle’s logs showed that Autopilot was first engaged by the driver just 10 seconds prior to the accident, and then the driver immediately removed his hands from the wheel,” a Tesla spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement. “Autopilot had not been used at any other time during that drive. We are deeply saddened by this accident and our thoughts are with everyone affected by this tragedy.”

To navigate dynamic environments, autonomous vehicles (AVs) should be able to process all information available to them and use it to generate effective driving strategies. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have recently proposed a social perception scheme for planning the behavior of autonomous cars, which could help to develop AVs that are better equipped to deal with uncertainty in their surrounding environment.

“My research has focused on how to design human-like driving behaviors for autonomous cars,” Liting Sun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our goal is to build AVs that do not only understand human behavior, but also perform in a similar way in multiple aspects, including perception, reasoning and action.”

Sun and her colleagues observed that human drivers tend to treat other vehicles as dynamic obstacles, often inferring additional information from their behavior on the road. This information is generally occluded environment information or physically undetectable social information.

Continue reading “A social perception scheme for behavior planning of autonomous cars” »

Lilium first emerged in 2016 as an aviation startup with some very lofty ambitions, revealing plans to develop a five-seat electric aircraft that can take off vertically, switch to horizontal flight in mid-air and cover some sizable distances on each charge. The company has now taken a significant step toward achieving this goal, completing a flight of a full-scale prototype of its Lilium Jet for the very first time.

When the Wright brothers pioneered their first flight in 1903, they dreamed of transforming the way our world connected. It’s safe to say they would be astonished at the progress of aviation. From that 59 second flight traveling a distance of 852 feet, we have established a world where there is an airport in nearly every major city, giving people the opportunity to see the globe in ways the Wright Brothers dreamed of.

Scientists have discovered a new material that could hold the key to unlocking the potential of hydrogen powered vehicles.

As the world looks towards a gradual move away from fossil fuel powered cars and trucks, greener alternative technologies are being explored, such as electric battery powered vehicles.

Another ‘green’ technology with great potential is hydrogen power. However, a major obstacle has been the size, complexity, and expense of the fuel systems—until now.

Continue reading “New material could unlock potential for hydrogen powered vehicle revolution” »

Compared to the other preproduction electric aircraft we’ve seen so far, the Lilium Jet certainly stands out: it has an egg-shaped cabin perched on landing gear with a pair of parallel tilt-rotor wings. The wings are fitted with a total of 36 electric jet engines that tilt up for vertical takeoff and then shift forward for horizontal flight. There is no tail, rudder, propellers, or gearbox. When it’s complete, the Lilium Jet will have a range of 300 kilometers (186 miles) and a top speed of 300 km / hour (186 mph), the company says.

That’s much farther than many of its competitors are predicting of their electric aircraft. Remo Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer, said this was due to the Jet’s fixed-wing design, which requires less than 10 percent of its maximum 2,000 horsepower during cruise flight.

Continue reading “Electric air taxi startup Lilium completes first test of its new five-seater aircraft” »

Machine learning (ML), a form of artificial intelligence that recognizes faces, understands language and navigates self-driving cars, can help bring to Earth the clean fusion energy that lights the sun and stars. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are using ML to create a model for rapid control of plasma—the state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions—that fuels fusion reactions.

The sun and most stars are giant balls of plasma that undergo constant fusion reactions. Here on Earth, scientists must heat and control the plasma to cause the particles to fuse and release their energy. PPPL research shows that ML can facilitate such control.

Just like Harley-Davidson and Ducati.

Ford Motor Company, ones of America’s oldest companies, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in many ways from the supply chain to production to used car sales to self-driving vehicles. The company prioritizes technology, and this focus is one reason it’s leading the path to the future.