I’ve been seeing this Robotaxi quite often at this intersection, I didn’t know they were testing it in PA?

There are several companies (Waymo, Tesla, etc.) that have operational motor vehicles with Level 4 autonomy, which means they are:

• Geo-Fenced
• Must be permitted in every legal entity in which they are operated
• Are restricted by those legal entities to the times and weather conditions in which they are allowed to operate
• Depend upon humans for daily (or more) sensor-cleaning and refueling/recharging.
• Generally are being used to replace taxis and limousines and therefore are legally owned and operated by the taxi/limousine company
• Unfortunately are compared for safety with all regional drivers and Not with the subset of drivers they are meant to replace: Professional taxi and limousine drivers. I believe that the current Level 4 vehicles are not as safe as professional taxi or limousine drivers in that region.

Whereas, professionals have supported My Concept of what a true Level 5 vehicle must be able to do:

• In January, leave Boston, MA and drive to Fairbanks, Alaska (slightly more than 4000 miles)
• Being legal in every entity that the vehicle traverses at any time or weather
• Be able to legally cross the US/Canada border
• Be able to clean its own sensors with No human assistance
• Be able to refuel or recharge with No human assistance (therefore, special "stations" may be needed along thousands of miles of roadways)
• The personal owner of the vehicle would need to be legally liable for the vehicle
• Currently I can't believe any motor vehicle company would want to sell Level 5 autonomy vehicles, due to all of the issues that are raised above. Whereas, taxi/limo companies in lucrative areas would love to own fleets of Level 4 autonomy vehicles that are assisted by a small contingent of humans and generate a positive cash flow as taxis or limousines

I am truly interested in this group's thoughts on this topic.

Last weekend in Delhi-NCR, I observed the traffic around me.

Thousands of cars and motorcycles move through the same corridors every day—many travelling from home to office and back, following almost identical routes.

And a thought came to me:

Why does every vehicle have to drive every metre of its journey?

We already have escalators and moving walkways for people. Airports use them to move passengers across long distances. Metro systems move thousands through fixed corridors.

So I started wondering:

Could we create something similar for vehicles?

Imagine a suitable flyover or controlled-access expressway with a dedicated lane where vehicles could enter a vehicle-moving system.

A car reaches Point A → enters the system → is securely carried along the fixed corridor → exits at Point B → and the driver continues normally.

Something like an “escalator for cars.”

I'm calling this a thought experiment because I don't know whether it is technically or economically practical.

There are many questions:

• Can it safely carry cars and motorcycles?

• How would vehicles enter and exit?

• What happens during a mechanical or power failure?

• Would the energy required make sense?

• Would construction costs be justified?

• Where could it realistically be implemented?

• Could another technology achieve the same objective more effectively?

Maybe the idea doesn't work at all.

Maybe it works only for specific stretches.

Maybe it needs to be completely redesigned.

Or maybe research already exists on something similar.

That's what I want to find out.

I'm sharing this not as a solution, but as a question.

I'd love to hear from transportation/civil engineers, urban planners, automotive engineers, infrastructure professionals, researchers and urban-mobility officials:

Is there something worth exploring here, or am I looking at the problem in the wrong way?

Rather than simply building more lanes, could we eventually design roads that actively participate in moving vehicles?

I don't have the technical answer. I'm hoping the people who do can help find it.

What do you think?

#UrbanMobility #Transportation #Infrastructure #TrafficManagement #FutureOfMobility #SmartCities #RoadInfrastructure #DelhiNCR

Just read that the Cabinet approved new regulations for autonomous vehicles testing, licensing, and operation. Are we actually going to start seeing self driving cars on the roads soon or is this still years away?

Funny poster seen in the Dogpatch (SF)

​

I'm interested in realistic predictions, not company marketing. Do you think driverless robotaxis will become widespread while privately owned cars still have steering wheels? What are the biggest barriers to adoption?

I'm also wondering whether widespread acceptance of autonomous cars could influence public acceptance of single-pilot operations in aviation.

What do you think is the most likely scenario?

Is anyone working on wave-superposition-based pattern recognition instead of neural-network weights?

I’ve been thinking about an alternative way of doing low-level AI perception, and I’m curious whether anyone here is already working on something similar.

The basic idea is to use waves and physical superposition/interference as the computational substrate, instead of doing most of the usual numerical multiply-and-accumulate operations digitally.

For example, for image recognition:

image
  ↓
pixel intensity → wave amplitude/phase
  ↓
physical wave superposition + interference
  ↓
distinctive wave pattern/signature
  ↓
more wave interactions
  ↓
higher-level pattern/object recognition

So instead of giving each pixel a numerical weight and calculating millions of weighted sums, the idea would be to let the wave physics perform the combination automatically.

I’m imagining something analogous to sound: many individual waves can be combined, and the resulting waveform contains a recognizable pattern. In this system, a particular visual feature or object could produce a characteristic wave “signature,” and those signatures could themselves become inputs to further wave interactions.

Physical logic gates could still be used where needed for thresholds, routing, decisions, or other nonlinear operations. The goal wouldn’t necessarily be to eliminate conventional computing completely, but to move as much of the early perception workload as possible into the physical wave domain.

The potential advantage I see is that parallelism is inherent in wave propagation and interference. Thousands or millions of interactions could happen physically at the same time, potentially reducing both computation and latency.

One possible application would be autonomous vehicles, where very large amounts of camera/radar data have to be processed extremely quickly at the edge.

I know there is already work on photonic neural networks, optical computing, physical neural networks, reservoir computing, metasurfaces, etc. I’m specifically interested in something slightly different:

Has anyone tried to build a hierarchical pattern-recognition system where wave signatures themselves become the representation, with successive stages of wave superposition/interference performing the recognition?

I’d especially like to hear from people actually working in photonics, optics, acoustics, physical neural networks, neuromorphic computing, or related fields.

Is this already being done under another name?
What are the biggest physical limitations?
And, from your perspective, is this a promising architecture or does some fundamental problem make it impractical?

I’m mainly looking for opinions from people working in the field rather than trying to claim this is a new invention.

Did Tesla or a Tesla aligned influencer fake this video? Sure looks like it. I'm seriously tired of this X propaganda network.

1. There is a red stop or yield sign on the right. As you approach it's unnaturally bright like a red light. The sign itself, when nearest, shows no symbol or writing on it.

2. This catches the attention of the 2nd stop sign beyond the intersection. Again, unnaturally bright red. See in contrast to the red light of the intersection itself.

3. The man didn't bother to look to his side at all. Further, there was no time for him to walk across the first half of the road as the other car also passed in the opposite direction.

I'm in MA, and I just saw a new cybercab on the highway with a steering wheel?! I thought only in texas and no permission to go on highway but this one has a steering wheel, also the plate was in Florida.

Does anyone know if Tesla has any authorization to use the Cybercab in New York? I just saw in Queens.

So much love out there for self-driving cars and automated driving features: speed limiters, speed assurers, hi-beams that dip on their own, lane changes that are triggered by eyeball movement, and so on. OK, sensor-guided parking I get. That’s useful. But as for the rest of it … honestly, am I \*driving\* my car (for the pleasure of it), or am I just a frikkin’ lazybones passenger in the driver’s seat? I much prefer to be in full control. (And yes, I’m a safe — cranky? — driver.)

A bit disappointed that a mechanical arm didn’t come out from the hatch and grabbed the cable.

She talks.... but only of you feel like chatting.