automotive

Mobileye’s self-driving tech

A total of 12 cameras offer a 360-degree configuration for long-range surround view and parking in the Intel Mobileye autonomous car. (photo from Intel Corp.)

Jerusalem-based Intel subsidiary Mobileye reportedly has struck a deal to supply its future EyeQ5 chips for integration in eight million partially automated cars to be manufactured by an unidentified European automaker in 2021.

Partial automation, a step toward the eventual goal of fully self-driving vehicles, requires the driver to remain alert to road conditions. Mobileye is a world leader in advanced driver-assistance technology, dominating about 70% of the current market.

Intel acquired Mobileye in March 2017 for $15.3 billion, the largest-ever acquisition of an Israeli high-tech company.

“By the end of 2019, we expect over 100,000 Level 3 cars with Mobileye installed,” said Amnon Shashua, chief executive officer and chief technology officer, referring to self-driving cars in which the driver has about 10 seconds to take over if the system fails.

Shashua announced last month that Intel and Mobileye are starting to test their responsibility-sensitive safety (RSS) model in a 100-car autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet – each equipped with 12 cameras for 360-degree visibility – on the notoriously difficult-to-navigate streets of Jerusalem.

“In the coming months, the fleet will expand to the U.S. and other regions,” he said in a May 17 statement. “While our AV fleet is not the first on the road, it represents a novel approach that challenges conventional wisdom in multiple areas. Leveraging over 20 years of experience in computer vision and artificial intelligence, our vehicles are proving the Mobileye-Intel solution is the most efficient and effective.”

Shashua said a radar/lidar layer will be added to the cars in the second phase of development.

Regarding the next-gen EyeQ5-based compute system due out in early 2019, he added, “the current system on roads today includes approximately one-tenth of the computing power we will have available [then].”

Israel21c is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.

Voice will have control

One day, your car might be able to sense your mood and, if you’re agitated, send soothing music. (photo from autospies.com)

Back in 1995, Shlomo Peller founded Rubidium in the visionary belief that voice user interface (VUI) could be embedded in anything from a TV remote to a microwave oven, if only the technology were sufficiently small, powerful, inexpensive and reliable.

“This was way before IoT [the Internet of Things], when voice recognition was done by computers the size of a room,” Peller told Israel21c. “Our first product was a board that cost $1,000. Four years later, we deployed our technology in a single-chip solution at the cost of $1. That’s how fast technology moves.”

But consumers’ trust moved more slowly. Although Rubidium’s VUI technology was gradually deployed in tens of millions of products, people didn’t consider voice-recognition technology truly reliable until Apple’s virtual personal assistant, Siri, came on the scene in 2011.

“Siri made the market soar. It was the first technology with a strong market presence that people felt they could count on,” said Peller, whose Ra’anana-based company’s voice-trigger technology now is built into Jabra wireless sports earbuds and 66 Audio PRO Voice’s smart wireless headphones.

“People see that VUI is now something you can put anywhere in your house,” said Peller. “You just talk to it and it talks back and it makes sense. All the giants are suddenly playing in this playground and voice recognition is everywhere. Voice is becoming the most desirable user interface.”

Still, the technology is not yet as fast, fluent and reliable as it could be. VUI depends on good internet connectivity and can be battery-draining.

Peller said, in five years’ time, voice user interface will be part of everything we do, from turning on lights, to doing laundry, to driving.

“I met with a big automaker to discuss voice interface in cars, and their working assumption is that, within a couple of years, all cars will be continuously connected to the internet, and that connection will include voice interface,” he said.

As voice user interface moves to the cloud, privacy concerns will have to be dealt with, he added. “We see that there has to be a seamless integration of local (embedded) technology and technology in the cloud. The first part of what you say, your greeting or ‘wakeup phrase,’ is recognized locally and the second part (like, ‘What’s the weather tomorrow?’) is sent to the cloud. It already works like that on Alexa but it’s not efficient. Eventually, we’ll see it on smartwatches and sports devices.”

Diagnosing illness

Tel Aviv-based Beyond Verbal analyzes emotions from vocal intonations. Its Moodies app is used in 174 countries to help gauge what speakers’ voices (in any language) reveal about their emotional status. Moodies is used by employers for job interviewees, retailers for customers, and in many other scenarios.

The company’s direction is shifting to health, as the voice-analysis platform has been found to hold clues to well-being and medical conditions, said Yoram Levanon, Beyond Verbal’s chief scientist. “There are distortions in the voice if somebody is ill and, if we can correlate the source of the distortions to the illness we can get a lot of information about the illness,” he told Israel21c. “We worked with the Mayo Clinic for two years confirming that our technology can detect the presence or absence of a cardio disorder in a 90-second voice clip.

“We are also working with other hospitals in the world on finding verbal links to ADHD, Parkinson’s, dyslexia and mental diseases. We’re developing products and licensing the platform, and also looking to do joint ventures with AI companies to combine their products with ours.”

Levanon said that, in five years, healthcare expenses will rise dramatically and many countries will experience a severe shortage of physicians. He envisions Beyond Verbal’s technology as a low-cost decision-support system for doctors.

“The population is aging and living longer, so the period of time we have to monitor, from age 60 to 110, takes a lot of money and health professionals. Recording a voice costs nearly nothing and we can find a vocal biomarker for a problem before it gets serious,” said Levanon.

Beyond Verbal could synch with the AI (artificial intelligence) elements in phones, smart home devices or other IoT devices to understand the user’s health situation and deliver alerts.

Sensing your mood

Banks use voice-analysis technology from Herzliya-based VoiceSense to determine potential customers’ likelihood of defaulting on a loan. Pilot projects with banks and insurance companies in the United States, Australia and Europe are helping to improve sales, loyalty and risk assessment regardless of the language spoken.

“We were founded more than a decade ago with speech analytics for call centres to monitor customer dissatisfaction in real time,” said chief executive officer Yoav Degani. “We noticed some of the speech patterns reflected current state of mind but others tended to reflect ongoing personality aspects, and our research linked speech patterns to particular behaviour tendencies. Now we can offer a full personality profile in real time for many different use cases such as medical and financial.”

Degani said the future of voice-recognition tech is about integrating data from multiple sensors for enhanced predictive analytics of intonation and content. “Also of interest,” he said, “is the level of analysis that could be achieved by integrating current state of mind with overall personal tendencies, since both contribute to a person’s behaviour. You could be dissatisfied at the moment and won’t purchase something but perhaps you tend to buy online in general, and you tend to buy these types of products.”

In connected cars, automakers will use voice analysis to adjust the web content sent to each passenger in the vehicle. “If the person is feeling agitated, they could send soothing music,” said Degani.

Personal robots, he predicted, will advance from understanding the content of the user’s speech to understanding the user’s state of mind. “Once they can do that, they can respond more intelligently and even pick up on depression and illness,” he said.

Degani predicted that, in five years’ time, people will routinely provide voice samples to healthcare providers for analytics, and human resources professionals will be able to judge a job applicant’s suitability for a specific position on the basis of recorded voice analysis using a job-matching score.

Capester reports violations

Capester offers a platform that allows users to report parking violations by filming and submitting legally admissible videos anonymously. (screenshot)

A great idea for an app was born out of a maddening experience for Ohad Maislish, an Israeli who walked with crutches for years following a skydiving accident. When he arrived for Shabbat dinner at his brother’s house, the sole handicap spot was occupied by a car without the proper permit. Since parking inspectors don’t work on Friday nights, he had to go to a police station and file a report, wait for the case to be processed and face the possibility of testifying in court in front of the offender.

Why couldn’t he simply use his smartphone to document the incident? The police explained that because videos can be doctored, such evidence wouldn’t stand up in court. So, Maislish, who started work at Microsoft’s Haifa research and development centre at age 17, called upon his background in computer science – and some friends with digital security and legal expertise – to create Capester, a platform enabling users to report parking violations by filming and submitting legally admissible videos anonymously.

In October 2014, with seed investment from BRM Capital and OurCrowd First, the founders spent 18 months perfecting a mobile app that would meet the court’s standards, assuring that the videos cannot be fabricated or altered. They worked closely with lawyers, including digital evidence expert Haim Ravia, chair of the internet, cyber and copyright group of the Pearl Cohen law firm in Herzliya.

Capester authenticates the video and sends it to the relevant local authority, which then determines whether to ticket the vehicle owner.

“We approached municipalities and each one had its own general counsel examine our legal opinion before approving Capester,” Maislish told Israel21c.

The app is available for Android and iOS from Google Play and the App Store. For each properly documented violation video, Capester – which is based in Petah Tikva – makes a donation to Access Israel, a nonprofit organization promoting accessibility and improved quality of life for people with disabilities in Israel.

“As a private company, we can’t issue tickets but only provide a platform for supplying evidence,” Maislish stressed. “If you record a violation in India, for example, it has to be in a place where we have an agreement with the relevant authority.”

He is not ready to reveal details of future marketing plans. “We are constantly looking to expand our services,” he said.

Moving violations

In related news, two new apps also help Israeli motorists stay safer on the roads.

The National Road Safety Authority, the Israel Police Traffic Department and the nonprofit Nativ Batuach (Safe Lane) organization have partnered to create the Guardians of the Road program. Using an app developed for the project at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, approved volunteers continuously photograph the road and vehicles visible through their windshield. When they see a traffic violation, they prompt the system by voice to deliver a video report to a control centre in the National Road Safety Authority for further evaluation and possible action by the police.

As well, a private startup, Nexar, has launched what it calls the world’s first AI (artificial intelligence) dashcam app. Nexar employs machine vision and sensor fusion algorithms to leverage a smartphone’s sensors to analyze and understand the car’s surroundings and provide documentation in case of accidents. Using this vehicle-to-vehicle network, Nexar also can warn users in real time of dangerous situations beyond their line of sight, effectively giving drivers more time to react. Founded by Eran Shir and Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz in early 2015, the company raised $10 million from Aleph, Mosaic Ventures, True Ventures and Slow Ventures. It has offices in Tel Aviv, New York and San Francisco.

Automakers in Israel

The 911 Turbo S Exclusive Series, Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, 2017. (photo from newsroom.porsche.com)

Porsche is establishing an innovation office in Tel Aviv, investing an eight-figure sum in the Magma and Grove venture capital funds. Further investments in start-ups and funds are planned. “Israel is a key market for IT experts and engineers. It has more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world. This talent and technological know-how coupled with the great expertise offered by our employees creates the ideal breeding ground for future business models,” said Porsche’s Lutz Meschke. He added that close collaboration with Israeli experts is necessary so that the company can quickly assess new technologies, develop good relationships and pilot appropriate solutions.

The Magma Venture (MV) fund is focused on artificial intelligence and automotive: with investments in numerous start-ups, like Waze, MV is one of the major venture capital (VC) funds in Israel and has $600 million US under management. Grove Ventures is a VC company with a volume of $100 million US; its primary early-stage investment areas are the internet of things (IoT), Cloud technologies and artificial intelligence.

– porsche.com

***

Mercedes Benz, General Motors, BMW, Ford, Honda, Uber, Volkswagen, Renault and Volvo also have opened R&D centres in Israel and/or invested in Israeli technology since 2016. The Honda Silicon Valley Lab, Volvo, Hertz International and Israel’s Ituran are sponsoring DRIVE, a new smart-mobility accelerator, co-working space and prototyping lab in Tel Aviv.

Jerusalem-headquartered Mobileye, prominent in the engineering of self-driving cars, was acquired by Intel in March for $15.3 billion US. Mobileye is partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and corporations including Microsoft to establish an international transportation lab in the Israeli port city of Ashdod.

– Abigail Klein Leichman, Israel21c

***

Prof. Yoram Shiftan, head of transportation research at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, said Israel “is one of the major contributors to driverless automated car technology.”

– JNS.org

Help your teen drive safely

New drivers need a lot of practice to gain enough experience and confidence to handle daily driving hazards and unexpected situations. (photo from bcaa.com)

According to research, teens value the opinions of their parents most of all (even if it doesn’t always seem like it). That’s why understanding the risks associated with driving and sharing your knowledge are so important during this process. Understanding the risks and facts will help you set rules, consistently enforce those rules and model responsible driving. Your actions make a significant difference.

The information below has been adapted from the American Automobile Association’s Guide to Teen Driver Safety – Keys2Drive, which provides parents an easy way to work with their teens through each step, from choosing a driver education program to deciding when they can drive on their own. There are three main learning-to-drive stages: before your teen starts driving, driving with supervision and driving on their own.

Before your teen starts driving, parents and teens should talk about using seat belts and set rules and consequences related to seat belt use. Establish a seat belt policy that applies to all situations, including buckling up as a driver or passenger, and having all passengers buckle up. It is important that seat belt use becomes so much a habit that it is automatic.
In crashes, seat belts help keep you and your passengers inside the vehicle where you are the safest. In crashes, seat belts keep you from hitting objects or other passengers inside the vehicle. Even if your car is equipped with airbags, seat belts are still needed to prevent serious injury in crashes. Drivers under age 21 are the least likely to wear seat belts and the most likely to crash.

Supervised driving is actually some of the safest driving your teen will do. By teaching under low-risk conditions and then gradually adding new roads and traffic conditions, you help your teen gain experience. Supervised driving will also help you decide when your teen is ready to drive on their own. Even though your teen might be old enough to get a licence, you decide when your teen is ready. Practise – different weather, traffic conditions and road types – use seat belts and make sure your teen knows that distracted driving can be fatal. According to ICBC, using cellphones and texting while driving is the second leading cause of car crash fatalities in British Columbia (81 per year), behind speeding (94) and just ahead of impaired driving (78).

Driver education and training can help your teen learn the rules of the road and how to drive safely. New drivers need a foundation of knowledge, skills and plans to reduce their risk behind the wheel. Quality driver education can help develop safe driving attitudes, hazard recognition, vehicle positioning and speed adjustment and visual search habits. Using a professional driver education school can be an effective way to provide your teen with the training needed. It can also help build your relationship with your teen. Some very skilled and safety-conscious parents may not have the time or temperament to be the best teacher.

Safe driving requires concentration, knowledge and judgment – much more than just being able to manoeuvre the vehicle. New drivers need a lot of practice to gain enough experience and confidence to handle daily driving hazards and unexpected situations. Teens will show the greatest improvement in the first 1,600 to 8,000 kilometres of driving. However, they will continue to show noticeable improvement for up to 32,000 kilometres.

First, teens need to become familiar with the vehicle, then to practise basic driving skills such as turning, parking and backing up. At first, practise away from traffic in low-speed areas like parking lots and neighborhood streets. In the beginning, always practise in daylight and good weather. Once you are sure your teen understands the basics, practise more complex skills such as changing lanes. As your teen’s skills increase, gradually add more complex and difficult situations such as larger roads, higher speed limits, heavier traffic and night driving. Always set goals prior to each driving lesson.

Only practise when you are both ready, are in good moods and have sufficient time. Practice sessions should be long enough to accomplish the goals, but short enough to avoid fatigue, loss of concentration and frustration. Practise as often as possible so that your teen can accumulate driving skills.

Driving on their own – the AAA has created a template for a parent-teen driving agreement with the goal of reducing the risks. It is comprised of checkpoints. Discuss and assign unsupervised driving privileges for each stage, with the privileges increasing with each checkpoint; for example, initially, your teen can only drive to 9 p.m. with no teen passengers and only in dry weather on neighborhood roads, but, by Checkpoint 4, they have few, if any restrictions. Decide how long each checkpoint’s privileges should remain in effect and, based on the length of time on which you agree, write in the date to review your teen’s progress. Discuss each rule, what might comprise a violation of that rule and the consequences of a violation, including the loss of driving privileges. On the review date, consider moving to the next checkpoint if your teen passes the “quick check”:

• Have enough supervised driving practice?

• Advance in driving skills and judgment?

• Obey traffic laws? (never use alcohol or other drugs and drive, never ride with a person who is driving after using alcohol or other drugs, never ride in a car where any alcohol or drug use is occurring, always wear your seat belt at all times as a driver or passenger, always have every passenger wear a seat belt, do not drive aggressively – e.g., speeding, tailgating or cutting others off)

• Take no unnecessary risks? (no playing around with passengers, messing around with the radio, talking on a cellphone, etc.; do not drive when overly tired, angry or upset; do not put yourself or others at increased risk by making unnecessary trips in adverse weather)

• “Check in” with parent before each driving event? (examples include a teen telling their parent where they are going, who their passengers will be, calling if they are going to be more than 30 minutes late or if their plans change, and calling if they cannot get home safely because of weather conditions, alcohol use or other reasons so a parent can arrange a safe ride)

• Rarely lose driving privileges?

If your teen’s progress is not satisfactory, set another review date for the current checkpoint. If your teen’s progress is satisfactory, move to the next checkpoint and decide on a review date. Continue until you have completed all the checkpoints.
Distracted drivers are dangerous drivers, and teenage drivers are more easily distracted than older drivers. Also, because of their inexperience, they don’t react as well when they suddenly perceive a danger. Every day, car crashes end more teen lives than cancer, homicide and suicide combined, and many of these teens are killed as passengers of other teen drivers. Based on kilometres driven, teens are involved in three times as many fatal crashes as all other drivers.

As a parent, you can help reduce the risks to your teen. You can set clear expectations and rules about safe driving and minimizing distractions – and you can model safe and respectful driving, including making family rules by which everyone abides.

Driverless cars one step closer

Prof. Zvi Shiller in the RAV Lab. (photo from israel21c.org)

Within a few years, you may be traveling in a car with nobody at the wheel. Whether you call it an autonomous, driverless or self-driving vehicle, this automobile of the near future needs a host of complex components, some now under development at Israeli companies and academic laboratories.

“You will be able to go to, let’s say, Paris or Tokyo, rent a car, swipe a card and tell it where you want it to go. You won’t have to know the area or the traffic rules,” explained Prof. Zvi Shiller, founder of the department of mechanical engineering and mechatronics at Ariel University and director of its Paslin Laboratory for Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles (RAV Lab).

The biggest benefit will be fewer traffic accidents than we have today – which cause more than 30,000 casualties annually in the United States alone – by eliminating human error in driving. But that requires a very, very smart car.

In the RAV Lab, Shiller and his students are developing algorithms that will automatically modulate speed and handling in response to constantly changing, unpredictable road conditions. Driverless cars will need this capability to meet future safety regulations.

“Today’s driverless cars, introduced by leading car companies such as Ford, Volvo and even Google, can drive very well on a road that is smooth and flat. Our research is about driving over a surface with bumps, ruts and hills,” said Shiller. “This is much more difficult because you can easily lose stability on that kind of terrain. If you’re driving too fast over a bump, you may jump into the air. You have to know at which speed you can drive safely without losing contact with the ground. You may need off-road driving capabilities less than 10% of the time, but you can’t trust a car that cannot handle those 10%.”

The current research continues Shiller’s work at the University of California-Los Angeles Laboratory for Robotics and Automation, which he founded and headed for 14 years before joining Ariel University in 2001.

At the RAV Lab, Shiller and his students have developed a small mobile robot that manoeuvres between obstacles at high speed, showing how the driverless car would handle itself.

“I haven’t seen a similar robot moving as fast,” said Shiller. “This stems from our ability to compute the optimal velocity that exploits the robot’s motion capabilities.”

A couple of years ago, the lab published their results from testing a simple version of this algorithm against one developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Shiller earned graduate degrees in mechanical engineering.

“Our algorithm computes a collision-free path among 70 tightly spaced obstacles in half a millisecond, compared to 500 milliseconds (0.5 seconds) it took the algorithm from MIT,” he reported. “That’s 1,000 times faster!”

RAV Lab’s technology could be one of a few systems for driverless cars to come out of Israel. The different systems address everything from motion planning to cyber-security.

Among the companies working on self-driving car technologies is Jerusalem-based Mobileye, whose driver-assistance software is already built into approximately 3.3 million vehicles worldwide. Mobileye reportedly is collaborating with American electric car manufacturer Tesla on developing its driverless vehicle.

Shiller said that one of the most difficult functions to automate is the 3-D mapping system to take the place of human perception in identifying and avoiding moving and stationary hazards in the car’s vicinity.

“Researchers are still working on this,” he said. “Once we map the region around the vehicle, we can use this information to do the next part, which is planning the vehicle’s motion. That’s where my research comes in.”

Making life easier

Over the years, Shiller’s students have produced robots that climb stairs, clean windows, operate wheelchair lifts, dispense pills, push baby strollers uphill, turn pages and accomplish other everyday tasks. They’ve built up a portfolio of almost 90 robotic products over the last 10 years to solve daily life problems in a futuristic way. “Some of these are world firsts,” said Shiller.

The RAV Lab’s research has been supported by Israel’s ministries of science, transportation and defence, the Israeli Space Agency, General Motors and the Paslin Foundation.

As head of the Israeli Robotics Association (IROB), Shiller is optimistic that Israel can become a world leader in smart robotics.

“Quite a few of the Israeli robotics companies are world leaders in their fields,” he said, citing examples such as Robomow, the Dolphin swimming pool cleaner, the SpineAssist surgical device, Mobileye and the ReWalk exoskeleton.

“The research we do in Israel is state of the art,” said Shiller. “I believe that if we build upon the infrastructure developed over the last 25 years in the remarkable Israeli high-tech industry, we can become world leaders in robotics as well.”

For more information, visit ariel.ac.il/sites/shiller/ravlab.

Israel21C is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.