While creating self-driving car systems, it's natural that different companies might independently arrive at similar methods or results — but the similarities in a recent "first of its kind" Nvidia proposal to work done by Mobileye two years ago were just too much for the latter company's CEO to take politely.
Autonomous Vehicles
Pretty much every self-driving car on the road, not to mention many a robot and drone, uses lidar to sense its surroundings. But useful as lidar is, it also involves physical compromises that limit its capabilities. Lumotive is a new company with funding from Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures that uses metamaterials to exceed those limits, perhaps setting a new standard for the industry.
Gates-backed Lumotive upends lidar conventions using metamaterials
It seems inevitable that the high seas will eventually play host to a sort of proxy war as automated vessels clash over territory for the algae farms we'll soon need to feed the growing population. But this rocket-launching robo-boat is a peacetime vessel concerned only with global weather patterns.
Don’t worry, this rocket-launching Chinese robo-boat is strictly for science
A stagnating mobile app industry eyes automobiles and a driverless future as the path to much needed diversification and exponential revenue growth.
The new era in mobile
The initial report by the National Transportation Safety Board on the fatal self-driving Uber crash in March confirms that the car detected the pedestrian as early as 6 seconds before the crash, but did not slow or stop because its emergency braking systems were deliberately disabled.
Uber in fatal crash detected pedestrian but had emergency braking ...
Waymo has become the second company to apply for the newly-available permit to deploy autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on some California roads, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It would be putting its cars — well, minivans — on streets around Mountain View, where it already has an abundance of data.
Waymo reportedly applies to put autonomous cars on California roads ...
When Luminar came out of stealth last year with its built-from-scratch lidar system, it seemed to beat established players like Velodyne at their own game — but at great expense and with no capability to build at scale. After the tech proved itself on the road, however, Luminar got to work making its device better, cheaper, and able to be assembled in minutes rather than hours.
Luminar puts its lidar tech into production through acquisitions and ...
Logistics may not be the most exciting application of autonomous vehicles, but it's definitely one of the most important. And the marine shipping industry — one of the oldest industries in the world, you can imagine — is ready for it. Or at least two major Norwegian shipping companies are: they're building an autonomous shipping venture called Massterly from the ground up.
Massterly aims to be the first full-service autonomous marine shipping ...
Nvidia is temporarily stopping testing of its autonomous vehicle platform in response to last week's fatal collision of a self-driving Uber car with a pedestrian. TechCrunch confirmed this with the company.
Nvidia suspends all autonomous vehicle testing
A self-driving vehicle made by Uber has struck and killed a pedestrian. It's the first such incident and will certainly be scrutinized like no other autonomous vehicle interaction in the past. But on the face of it it's hard to understand how, short of a total system failure, this could happen when the entire car has essentially been designed around preventing exactly this situation from occurring.