Autonomous Vehicles

TinyML shows promise for bringing deep learning to applications where electrical power is scarce, processing in the cloud is impractical, and/or data privacy is paramount.

San Francisco officials are pushing back on self-driving taxis in the city after a deluge of public complaints.

Tesla, whose autonomous-vehicle technology has been implicated in a number of collisions, promoted it in a way that apparently was intended to deceive. Tesla deliberately misled the public about its vehicles’ ability to drive themselves, according to Bloomberg and other news outlets.

A Chinese naval ship navigates autonomously and controls a swarm of onboard drones. The Zhuhaiyun, billed as the first autonomous drone carrier, officially entered service after 12 hours of trials on open water, the South China Morning Post reported.

Apple is redrawing the road map for its self-driving car. The company is redesigning an autonomous car that has been in development for nearly a decade, Bloomberg reported. Originally intended to be fully autonomous under all conditions, the redesigned vehicle will allow for a human driver.

The United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) detailed autonomous vehicle collisions over a 12-month period.

Autonomous aircraft in the United Kingdom are getting their own superhighway. The UK government approved Project Skyway, a 165-mile system of interconnected drone-only flight routes.

The European Union passed a law that requires new vehicles to come equipped with automated safety features.

A website that aggregates AI jobs revealed the roles that are most in-demand. Ai-jobs.net published its second annual list of the job titles that appeared most frequently in its listings.

Dormant robotaxis are snarling traffic on the streets of San Francisco.What’s new: Cruise self-driving cabs lately have stalled en masse, Wired reported.

An autonomous research ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean — with a few pit stops to address challenges along the way. Built by IBM and marine research nonprofit ProMare, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship 400 (MAS400) last week completed a voyage from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The United States space agency is upgrading the system that pilots its helicopter on the Red Planet. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that Ingenuity, a drone sent to Mars as part of its 2020 mission to Mars, will receive a new collision-avoidance algorithm.

In Beijing, self-driving cars are rolling without a driver behind the wheel. China’s capital city authorized Pony.ai and Apollo Go, a Baidu subsidiary, to deploy self-driving taxis without a human in the driver’s seat.

Things are really starting to get going in the field of AI. After many years (decades?!) of focusing on algorithms, the AI community is finally ready to accept the central role of data and the high-capacity models that are capable of taking advantage of this data.

Tech companies generally try to be (or to appear to be) socially responsible. Would some rather let AI’s negative impacts slide?