#autonomousvehicle

#autonomousvehicle

John Deere's New Self-Driving, Autonomous Tractor Costs $500,000 and Can be Controlled from a PhoneTesla’s self-driving car may be all the rage, but for Minnesota farmer Doug Nimz, that’s old news: he’s been testing autonomous technology on his 2,000-acre corn and soybean farm for John Deere for four years.In early January, John Deere announced its fully autonomous farming tractor to the world in CES 2022. Rather than creating a wholly brand-new tractor, the company improved its popular self-steering 8R tractor by adding two things: a 12 stereo camera system and an Nvidia GPU that let the farmer control the tractor from a smartphone.John Deere’s autonomous tractor system relies on a camera pod of 3 pairs of stereo cameras located at the front of the tractor. The cameras act like human eyes: images taken by the left- and right-side cameras are combined to let the tractor identify obstacles 45 to 90 feet ahead.While an autonomous tractor would surely help the agriculture industry, where labor is an ever-present problem, John Deere is not without its critics. For one, the new autonomous tractor is priced at $500,000 - a cost that puts it out-of-reach of many small farmers.#selfdriving #tractor #JohnDeere #autonomousvehicle #farming

Simulation City: The Virtual World where Waymo Tests Its Self-Driving CarsTo get its autonomous or self-driving cars ready for real life, Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google) has been busy creating a virtual world where it can drive its cars on artificial streets and highways.The virtual world, called Simulation City, is one of two virtual worlds used by Waymo to train, test and validate its driving software that'll be used by self-driving cars moving on the open road.The Verge has some interesting details:Simulation is a critical piece of the puzzle for autonomous vehicles. These programs allow Waymo’s engineers to test — at scale — common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases, the learnings from which it then feeds into its real-world fleet.The key word is “scale” because these simulators allow Waymo to far exceed the distances its vehicles travel on public roads. As of 2020, Waymo said it’s simulated 15 billion miles of driving, compared to just 20 million miles of actual driving.In Simulation City, those real-world miles are now informing the miles driven in simulation, meaning the company has more confidence in the validity and reliability of the virtual situations it constructs for its vehicles.“Once that relationship is established in an increasingly strong way, we need fewer additional miles driven in the real world to basically say what we learned in simulation is correct,” Frankel said.#autonomousvehicle #selfdrivingcar #car #Waymo #simulation #artificialintelligence