Posts

Law issues regarding autonomous driving (CDIO #Assignment 5)

In this assignment we will further look into the legal problems regarding autonomous driving and its application. As the technology of AD vehicles develops extremely fast today, the build of legal framework may not be able to catch up the speed and fully take care of the newly technologies onto the market, and that’s where problems might happen. After viewing several materials, I found that the main ethic and legal problems can be summarized as following: 1.        Liability: Liability is probably the most major ethical issue regarding autonomous vehicles. Who to blame, and who should be responsible for accident if crash happens is always the hot topic among several agencies: engineers, manufactures, salers, users, pedestrians, governments or even law makers are all involved in this topic. If any of these accidents happens, often it is unclear or hard to decide who to blame. 2.        Society: Say, if large number of AD vehicles are released and used in the traffic system, w

Questions regarding drivers' feeling about Autonomous driving (CDIO #Assignment 6)

After talking so much about technologies and ethical problem regarding autonomous driving, let's now take a look into what drivers, or normal people feel about driving, or autonomous driving. The questions asked are: Do you drive? Why or why not? Would you be interested in having an autonomous vehicle? Why or why not? What do you feel about making vehicles autonomous? I invited ten people to ask these questions, some of them are middle aged working people, some of them are college students. The answers are as below: Graduated Student: No I do not drive. I live in a crowded city, it's more convenient to take public transportations. If I have the change I will maybe drive for fun. And I am not interested in autonomous driving, because then what's the fun of driving. I don't have any specific feelings about autonomous driving vehicles, it's kind of cool as long as it does not hit me. College Student: Yes I drive. I learned it before I went to college, an

Summary of personality assessment (CDIO #pre-assignment 4)

After some technological blogs, for this week's assignment, I will look further into myself through a personality assessment from ITP Metrics. From some questions regarding daily life and the way I handle stuffs, I got a report for my personality analysis. Here is the summary: Extraversion: My extraversion level is slighter higher than moderate. I am more likely to find myself alternating between managing multiple activities at once and finding time to take it easy and relax. I prefer to take charge and lead the group to success in a team, but I should not take over too much. I tend to be joyful and optimistic. I enjoy routine, stable work, and I am easy to make friends. I tend to have the ability to work both in a team or individually.  Emotionality: My emotionality level is low, which indicates that I am unlikely to become worried or stressed about achieving the team's objectives or completing your tasks. I do not easily lose my temper and am able to avoid most team conf

Ethical (CDIO #Assignment 3)

In this post, we will discuss about the ethical issues of autonomous vehicles: what if an accident happened to human (driver or pedestrian) within or out of the AVs, who to blame, driver, pedestrian, sellers, manufactures or the state (government)? As an engineering student, I couldn’t say I can properly analysis this problem from the ethic point of view, I can more discuss it from technique point and share some of my views. Say, if such accident happens as described in the pre-assignment requirement, the first thing to do is to find out the real reason of causing this accident: is the vehicle really acting as it should be? Or is it because of the poor road and environment condition? Of course the driver Alice should take some responsibility for this accident. Seems that she put too much trust on this autonomous vehicle and even turn into most aggressive mode in bad environment condition. It also could be the reason that seller Bob didn’t fully explain the function of vehicle,

Introduction to Autonomous Vehicle Technologies (CDIO #Assignment 2)

Image
In this week's CDIO assignment we will look deeper into autonomous vehicles and gain some understanding about the technologies used to achieve autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles are packed with technology. These wide range of technologies can be divided based on their main function area. To properly understand these technology, let's first look at the normal structure of an autonomous vehicle. As a complex intelligent system, the structure of autonomous vehicle or robot are usually divided into three parts: environment detection, decision making and vehicle motion control. Based on these three parts, different technologies are investigated relating to environment sensing, localization, path planning, path following and vehicle dynamic control. Many ADAS systems and functions are a combination of several technologies. For the autonomous vehicle development nowadays, most important focus are on environment sensing, which give the control unit of intelligent enough and ac

Introduction to Automated Vehicles (CDIO #Assignment 1)

Image
With fast development of automated technologies and computational ability, the aunomous driving of vehicles has become one of the hottest topics among both coventional autonomous companies (eg. GM and Ford) as well as IT companies (eg. Googleand Baidu). The first autonomous driving vehicle system is called "NavLab" from Carnegie Mellon University in USA in 1980s. After the autonmous vehicle competition called "Urban Challenge" in Amercian soon become famous and spread the fast development of autonomous technologies all around the world.  From modifying coventional vehicles to design autonomous systems from beginning of vehicle development, the autonomous driving technologies have seen many impressing breakthroughs over the 30 years. And it is even changing faster these five years than ever. Within this post we will discuss some basic ideas about autonomous driving, like the legal classification of AD (autonomous driving) levels and analysis some example