It's a big week for Robocar conferences.

In Berkeley, yesterday I attended and spoke at the "Robotics: Science and Systems" conference which had a workshop on autonomous vehicles. That runs to Wednesday, but overlapping and near SF Airport is the Automated Vehicles Symposium -- a merger of the TRB (Transportation Research Board) and AUVSI conferences on the same topic. 500 are expected to attend.

Yesterday's workshop was pretty good, with even a bit of controversy.

Yesterday saw:

Ed Olson on more of the lessons from aviation on handoff between automation and manual operation. This keeps coming up a a real barrier to some of the vehicle designs that have humans share the chores with the system.

Jesse Levinson of Stanford's team showed some very impressive work in automatic calibration of sensors, and even fusion of LIDAR and camera data, aligning them in real time in spite of movement and latency. This work will make sensors faster, more reliable and make fusion accurate enough to improve perception.

David Hall, who runs Velodyne, spoke on the history of their sensors, and his plans for more. He repeated his prediction that in large quantities his sensor could cost only $300. (I'm a bit skeptical of that, but it could cost much, much less than it does today.) David made the surprising statement that he thinks we should make dedicated roads for the vehicles. (Surprising not just because I disagree, but because you could even get by without much LIDAR on such roads.)

Marco Panove of Stanford showed research they did on Taxi models from New York and Singapore. The economics look very good. Dan Fagnant also presented related research assuming an on-demand semi shared system with pickup stations in every TAZ. It showed minimal vacant miles but also minimal successful rideshare. The former makes sense when it's TAZ to TAZ (TAZs are around a square mile) but I would have thought there would be more rideshare. The conclusion is that VMT go up due to empty miles, but that rideshare can partially compensate, though not as much as some might hope.

Ken Laberteaux of Toyota showed his research on the changing demographics of driving and suburbs. Conclusion: We are not moving back into the city, suburbanization is continuing. Finding good schools continues to drive people out unless they can afford private school are are childless.

The event had a 3-hour lunch break, where most went to watch some sporting event from Brazil. The Germans at the conference came back happier.

Some good technical talks presented worthwhile research

Sheng Zhao and a team from UC Riverside showed a method to get cm accuracy in position and even in pose (orientation) from cheap GPS receivers, by using improved math on phase-matching GPS. This could also be combined with cheap IMUs. Most projects today use very expensive IMUs and GPSs, not the cheap ones you find in your cell phone. This work may lead to being able to get reliable data from low cost parts.

Matthew Cornick and a team from Lincoln Lab at MIT showed very interesting work on using ground penetrating radar to localize. With GPR, you get a map of what's below the road -- you see rocks and material patterns down several feet. These vary enough, like the cracks and lines on a road, and so you can map them, and then find your position in that map -- even if the road is covered in snow. While the radar units are today bulky, this offers the potential for operations in snow.

A team from Toyota showed new algorithms to speed up the creation of the super-detailed maps needed for robocars. Their algorithms are good at figuring out how many lanes there are and when they start and stop. This could make it much cheaper to build the ultramaps needed in an automatic way, with less human supervision.

The legal and policy sessions got more heated.

Bryant Walker Smith laid out some new proposals for how to regulate and govern torts about the vehicles.

Eric Feron of Georgia Tech made proposals for how to do full software verification. Today formally proving and analysing code for correctness takes 0.6 hours per line of code -- it's not practical for the 50 million line (or more) software systems in cars today. Jonathan argues it can be made cheaper, and should be done. Note that fully half the cost of developing the 787 aircraft was software verification!

The final session, on policy included:

Jane Lappin on how DoT is promoting research.

Steve Shladover on how we're all way to optimistic on timelines, and that coming up with tests to demonstrate superior safety to humans is very far away, since humans run 65,000 hours between injury accidents.

Myself on why regulation should keep a light touch, and we should not worry too much about the Trolley Problem -- which came up a couple of times.

Raj Rajkumar of CMU on the success they have had showing the CMU/GM car to members of congress.

Now on to the AVS tomorrow.