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Concord is the most populous city in Contra Costa County, California, United States. According to an estimate completed by the United States Census Bureau, the city had a population of 129,295 in 2019, making it the eighth largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 1869 as Todos Santos by don Salvio Pacheco II, a noted Californio ranchero, the name was later changed to Concord. The city is a major regional suburban East Bay center within the San Francisco Bay Area, and is 29 miles east of San Francisco.
A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, robotic car or robo-car, is a car that is capable of operating with reduced or no human input. Self-driving cars are responsible for all driving activities including perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and controlling the vehicle, including navigating from origin to destination.
Vehicular communication systems are computer networks in which vehicles and roadside units are the communicating nodes, providing each other with information, such as safety warnings and traffic information. They can be effective in avoiding accidents and traffic congestion. Both types of nodes are dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) devices. DSRC works in 5.9 GHz band with bandwidth of 75 MHz and approximate range of 300 metres (980 ft). Vehicular communications is usually developed as a part of intelligent transportation systems (ITS).
Concord Naval Weapons Station was a military base established in 1942 north of the city of Concord, California at the shore of the Sacramento River where it widens into Suisun Bay. The station functioned as a World War II armament storage depot, supplying ships at Port Chicago. During World War II it also had a Naval Outlying Field at the southern edge of the base. It ceased being an operating airfield after World War II. During the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, Concord NWS processed and shipped thousands of tons of materiel out across the Pacific Ocean.
Vehicular automation involves the use of mechatronics, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems to assist the operator of a vehicle such as a car, lorries, aircraft, or watercraft. A vehicle using automation for tasks such as navigation to ease but not replace human control, qualify as semi-autonomous, whereas a fully self-operated vehicle is termed autonomous.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are created by applying the principles of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) – the spontaneous creation of a wireless network of mobile devices – to the domain of vehicles. VANETs were first mentioned and introduced in 2001 under "car-to-car ad-hoc mobile communication and networking" applications, where networks can be formed and information can be relayed among cars. It was shown that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications architectures will co-exist in VANETs to provide road safety, navigation, and other roadside services. VANETs are a key part of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) framework. Sometimes, VANETs are referred as Intelligent Transportation Networks. They are understood as having evolved into a broader "Internet of vehicles". which itself is expected to ultimately evolve into an "Internet of autonomous vehicles".
First Transit was an American transportation company. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, it operated over 300 locations, carrying more than 350 million passengers annually throughout the United States in 41 states, Puerto Rico, Panama, India and four Canadian provinces. In 2023 it was purchased by Transdev with the brand retired.
Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.
A connected car is a car that can communicate bidirectionally with other systems outside of the car. This connectivity can be used to provide services to passengers or to support or enhance self-driving functionality. For safety-critical applications, it is anticipated that cars will also be connected using dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) or cellular radios, operating in the FCC-granted 5.9 GHz band with very low latency.
Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.
From 2014 until 2024, Apple Inc. undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car, codenamed "Project Titan". Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research, but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018. In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform. In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars. In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars. In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.
A robotaxi, also known as robo-taxi, self-driving taxi or driverless taxi, is an autonomous car operated for a ridesharing company.
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is communication between a vehicle and any entity that may affect, or may be affected by, the vehicle. It is a vehicular communication system that incorporates other more specific types of communication as V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure), V2N (vehicle-to-network), V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle), V2P (vehicle-to-pedestrian), V2D (vehicle-to-device).
Argo AI LLC was an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was co-founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, veterans of the Google and Uber automated driving programs. Argo AI was an independent company that built software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure to power self-driving vehicles. Argo was mostly backed by Ford Motor Co. (2017) and the Volkswagen Group (2020).
Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology. The company is a largely autonomous subsidiary of General Motors. Following a series of incidents, it suspended operations in October 2023, and the CEO resigned in November 2023.
The death of Elaine Herzberg was the first recorded case of a pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car, after a collision that occurred late in the evening of March 18, 2018. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona, United States, when she was struck by an Uber test vehicle, which was operating in self-drive mode with a human safety backup driver sitting in the driving seat. Herzberg was taken to the local hospital where she died of her injuries.
Drive.ai, a subsidiary of Apple Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California that uses artificial intelligence to make self-driving systems for cars. It has demonstrated a vehicle driving autonomously with a safety driver only in the passenger seat. To date, the company has raised approximately $77 million in funding. Drive.ai's technology can be modified to turn a vehicle autonomous.
Cellular V2X (C-V2X) is a 3GPP standard for V2X applications such as self-driving cars. It is an alternative to 802.11p, the IEEE specified standard for V2V and other forms of V2X communications.
The Apolong, sometimes referred to as the Baidu Apollo project, is a driverless vehicle developed by Baidu, Kinglong and a consortium of more than 40 companies.
Regulation of self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles and automated driving system is an increasingly relevant topic in the automotive industry strongly related to the success of the actual technology. Multiple countries have passed local legislation and agreed on standards for the introduction of autonomous cars.
References
- ↑ "Self-Driving Cars Headed to Contra Costa" (PDF) (Press release). Contra Costa Transportation Authority. October 1, 2014. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 31, 2014. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
- ↑ "Here's Where Driverless Cars Are Learning the Rules of the Road". Time.
- ↑ Philip Elmer-DeWitt (15 August 2015). "Here's the autonomous vehicle test bed Apple asked to see". Fortune.
- ↑ Harris, Mark (August 14, 2015). "Documents confirm Apple is building self-driving car". The Guardian .
- ↑ "GoMentum V2X Lab". YouTube. 2019-08-15.