autonomous vehicles

raspberry-pi-powered-ai-bike-light-detects-cars,-alerts-bikers-to-bad-drivers

Raspberry Pi-powered AI bike light detects cars, alerts bikers to bad drivers

autonomous vehicles, bicycles, bike lights, bikes, Cars, machine learning, Raspberry Pi, Tech / /

Group ride —

Data from multiple Copilot devices could be used for road safety improvements.

–

Copilot mounted to the rear of a road bike

Velo AI

Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.

Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber’s (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a “pandemic passion project” for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.

A look into the computer vision of the Copilot.

While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they’re largely radar-based. That means they can’t distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.

Copilot purports to do a lot more:

  • Identify cars, bikes, and pedestrians
  • Alert riders audibly about cars “Following,” “Approaching,” and “Overtaking”
  • Issue visual warning to drivers who are approaching too close or too fast
  • Send visual notifications and a simplified rear road view to an optional paired smartphone
  • Record 1080p video and tag “close calls” and “incidents” from your phone

At 330 grams, with five hours of optimal battery life (and USB-C recharging), it’s not for the aero-obsessed rider or super-long-distance rider. And at $400, it might not speak to the most casual and infrequent cyclist. But it’s an intriguing piece of kit, especially for those who already have, or considered, a Garmin or similar action camera for watching their back. What if a camera could do more than just show you the car after you’re already endangered by it?

Copilot's computer vision can alert riders to cars that are

Copilot’s computer vision can alert riders to cars that are “Following,” “Approaching,” and “Overtaking.”

Velo AI

The Velo team detailed some of their building process for the official Raspberry Pi blog. The Compute Module 4 powers the core system and lights, while a custom Hailo AI co-processor helps with the neural networks and computer vision. An Arducam camera provides the vision and recording.

Beyond individual safety, the Velo AI team hopes that data from Copilots can feed into larger-scale road safety improvements. The team told the Pi blog that they’re starting a partnership with Pittsburgh, seeding Copilots to regular bike commuters and analyzing the aggregate data for potential infrastructure upgrades.

The Copilot is available for sale now and shipping, according to Velo AI. A December 2023 pre-order sold out.

Raspberry Pi-powered AI bike light detects cars, alerts bikers to bad drivers Read More »

cruise-failed-to-disclose-disturbing-details-of-self-driving-car-crash

Cruise failed to disclose disturbing details of self-driving car crash

autonomous vehicles, Cars, Cruise, GM, self-driving, syndication / /

full disclosure —

Company did not share all it knew about the accident with regulators.

–

A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco.

Enlarge / A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco.

Cruise

A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.

The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California’s Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic—dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm’s version of events, as well as its recommendations.

The investigators found that when Cruise played a video of the crash taken from its autonomous vehicle for government officials, it did not “verbally point out” the vehicle’s pullover maneuver. Internet connectivity issues that occurred when the company tried to share video of the incident “likely precluded or hampered” regulators from seeing the full video, the report concluded.

Cruise executives are singled out in the report for failing to properly communicate with regulators. Company leaders assumed that regulators would ask questions that would lead the company to provide more information about the pedestrian dragging, the report says. And Cruise leadership is described as “fixated” on demonstrating to the media that it was a human-driven car, not its autonomous vehicle, that first struck the pedestrian. That “myopic focus,” the law firm concludes, led Cruise to “omit other important information” about the incident.

“The reasons for Cruise’s failings in this instance are numerous,” the law firm concluded, “poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public.” It said the company must take “decisive steps” to restore public trust.

Another third-party report on the crash released by Cruise today, by the engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that technical issues contributed to the autonomous vehicle’s dangerous pullover maneuver. Although the self-driving car’s software correctly detected, perceived, and tracked the pedestrian and the human-driven car, it classified the crash as a side-impact collision, which led it to pull over and drag the woman underneath it. Cruise says its technical issues were corrected when it recalled its software in November.

Cruise has paused its self-driving operations across the US since late October. Nine executives, plus CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt, left in the fallout from the crash. In late 2023, the company laid off almost a quarter of its employees. General Motors says it will cut spending on the tech company by hundreds of millions of dollars this year compared to last.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Cruise failed to disclose disturbing details of self-driving car crash Read More »