Self-driving Technologies

Article n1: Self-driving Shopping Carts Could Greet You at Walmart

By Carl Engelking | September 13, 2016

                                              The Roomba-like device, seen under the cart, would slide into position and pull the cart.

If it has wheels, there’s a good chance someone, somewhere is going figuring out how to make it roll on its own.

Last week, for example, the United States government granted Walmart’s patent request for a system of self-driving shopping carts. Forget yanking carts from a train of clanking metal, or wheeling the things back to their corrals after your car is loaded.

The carts themselves won’t change; instead, a fleet of Roomba-like transport units would slide under carts and ferry them through the store.

According to Walmart’s patent request, customers will be able to summon one of these cart-pullers — each equipped with cameras and sensors — with their “user interface device”, perhaps a smartphone app, and a motorized unit will attach to a cart parked in a docking station and pull it to the customer. Once customer and cart meet, the transport unit will serve as a personal store escort.

For example, customers could wirelessly beam their shopping list to their cart chauffeur and it’ll guide them through the store item-by-item, according to the request. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Just type it into your “interface device” and follow your cart. The transport units, in theory, will also round up carts adrift in the parking lot and return them to their docking station.

Just as a reminder, this is only a patent. It isn’t clear when, or if, the system will be deployed in Walmart stores. However, it does offer a glimpse at the future of shopping — if you still shop in brick-and-mortar stores.

Let’s just hope the cart taxi sensors and cameras will be sensitive enough to avoid slamming a cart into the back of your ankle.

Article n2: Smiling Self-Driving Cars Could Put Pedestrians at Ease

By Jeremy Hsu | September 29, 2016

Future self-driving cars could smile to let pedestrians know it’s OK to cross the street.

Many people crossing the road engage in the simple pedestrian ritual of making eye contact with drivers waiting in their cars at the intersection. But a video shows baffled pedestrians pausing when they see a driver reading the newspaper or sleeping at the wheel. Such confusion could become more common as growing numbers of people cross paths with self-driving cars.

The usual ritual of exchanging looks between pedestrians and drivers is likely to become endangered as self-driving cars free up human drivers to do anything but pay attention to the road. That is why Semcon, an international technology company that specializes in product development, came up with the possible solution of giving self-driving cars a front-end display that allows them to “smile” at pedestrians. The smiling car concept is just one possible way that future self-driving cars might communicate with people around them to avoid any confusion or accidents.

Semcon has not outfitted any actual self-driving cars with the smile display just yet. But to show the need for pedestrians to get some sort of signal from driverless vehicles, Semcon ran a demonstration with a manually-driven car rigged up to look like a self-driving car. The “driver” in those cars pretended to busy themselves with reading or sleeping instead of paying attention to the road.

Not surprisingly, pedestrians crossing the street tended to hesitate or even react with shock at the “drivers” who were sometimes literally asleep at the wheel.

To drive the point home, Semcon also commissioned a survey by the analyst firm Inizio to research people’s attitudes toward self-driving cars in countries such as Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. That survey showed that more than 80 percent of people in the surveyed countries will at least occasionally seek eye contact with drivers before crossing a street with no traffic light. U.S. survey participants were also most likely to say they would “always” seek eye contact with drivers (60 percent).

Many of those surveyed also had little trust in self-driving cars detecting and stopping for pedestrians. U.S. survey participants had the most trust in driverless vehicles, but 38 percent still said they were “quite unconfident” or “very unconfident” about self-driving cars stopping for pedestrians. Large numbers of survey respondents across all countries seemed uncertain about the technology by responding “neither confident or unconfident.” And no country had a majority of respondents saying they were “quite” or “very” confident (U.S. confidence was highest here at 33 percent).

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Communicate

Eye contact has already proven key in ordinary pedestrian encounters with normal cars driven by people. Past research has shown that eye contact between pedestrians and drivers allows for calm interactions, according to Volvo researchers based in Sweden who presented research at the AHFE 2016 International Conference on Human Factors in Transportation. But drivers who didn’t seem to be paying attention made pedestrians less willing to cross the street in front of the cars.

Researchers at the Design Lab of the University of California, San Diego have also begun interviewing both pedestrians and human drivers to better understand the future of communication and trust involving self-driving cars. They  presented a brief paper on these issues at the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.

Such communication is key because it builds trust between humans and the growing numbers of robots roving the streets. And trust is crucial to public acceptance of driverless vehicles. Pedestrian encounters with self-driving cars will only rise as ridesharing companies such as Uber have begun rolling out driverless taxis for public testing. Even before the Uber public testing, the startup nuTonomy began testing a self-driving taxi service in Singapore.

Such driverless taxis join the self-driving cars already being tested by Google on public roads in California, Washington, Arizona and Texas. Meanwhile, Volvo has been testing self-driving cars on public roads in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Miles to Go

In any case, no company has yet succeeded in deploying fully automated driverless vehicles on public roads that don’t require any human assistance or intervention. Even the human engineers developing and testing self-driving cars do not fully trust the technology’s capabilities just yet. As a result, Uber’s first public tests with customers riding in self-driving cars still include a human driver and an engineer sitting in the front seats.

The humans typically take the wheel whenever the self-driving cars encountered pedestrians. Heather Somerville, a journalist with Reuters, observed her Uber driver taking control whenever pedestrians crossed the street. A Wired journalist also noted an Uber engineer’s dissatisfaction during a particular pedestrian interaction.

“The engineer at the wheel takes over control every few minutes,” wrote Alex Davies, a transportation reporter for Wired. “Once, he’s not happy with how long the car is waiting before slowing for a pedestrian.”

Perhaps one day both pedestrians and self-driving cars will smile when they encounter each other at the crosswalk.

Resume: The first article is written by Carl Engelking for Discover Magazine. It talks about a new revolution in the supermarket industry: The self-driving shopping carts. Actually, the carts will not endure a major transformation, it will be equipped by cameras and sensors to help the customer finding what he needs without losing time while searching for what he wants to buy in a huge supermarket. It will surely work with a smartphone app in which you select products and then will have to follow the cart. I really like this idea, it certainly help some customers who are in a rush or if their mobility is limited.

The second article has been made by Jeremy Hsu for Discover Magazine and speaks about Future self-driving cars. After many surveys showing that most of the people are making eye contact between the driver and the pedestrian, the company Semco decided to add to their new self-driving cars a front-end display that allows them to smile at the pedestrians, telling them that they can cross the street safely.

It is still a prototype for now a brand known as Uber also decided to launch its own self-driving cars.

Those two completely different technology are really great and project me in a new future experience that I will love to try but those two sounds like ideas to make the human being move to a lazier lifestyle where robots will serve us. We have to be careful on this point.