Ford


A ride in Ford’s first self-driving car

Published on Sep 12, 2016

Ford is gearing up to bring autonomous cars to market in 2021. They gave us a preview ride of what's coming in self-driving cars.
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Under the hood of Ford and Delphi's autonomous driving plans

Published on Jan 7, 2017

Engadget's Kerry Davis sat down with James McBride, Technical leader for autonomous vehicles at Ford and Jim Zizelman, VP of engineering for electronic services at Delphi, to talk about the challenges remaining in self-driving cars and what they're anticipating for pricing, when consumers are able to buy their brands in 2021.
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Ford driverless car surprises the public on city streets

Published on Sep 13, 2017

Today, a simple head nod or hand wave from a driver is usually enough to indicate it’s okay for a pedestrian to cross the street, but in an autonomous vehicle future, how will a self-driving car with no human driver communicate with pedestrians, cyclists or humans operating other cars on the road?

Looking to prepare for this eventual reality, Ford Motor Company partnered with Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, to conduct a user experience study to test out a method for communicating a vehicle’s intent by soliciting real-world reactions to a self-driving car on public roads.

“Understanding how self-driving vehicles impact the world as we know it today is critical to ensuring we’re creating the right experience for tomorrow,” said John Shutko, Ford’s human factors technical specialist. “We need to solve for the challenges presented by not having a human driver, so designing a way to replace the head nod or hand wave is fundamental to ensuring safe and efficient operation of self-driving vehicles in our communities.”

As part of Ford’s efforts to ensure autonomous vehicles can safely share the road with humans, the joint research project set out to investigate the most effective means for the vehicle to communicate. The team considered using displayed text, but that would require people all understand the same language. The use of symbols was rejected because symbols historically have low recognition among consumers.

In the end, the researchers decided lighting signals are the most effective means for creating a visual communications protocol for self-driving vehicles. As light signals for turning and braking indication are already standardized and widely understood, they determined the use of lighting signals is best to communicate whether the vehicle is in autonomous drive mode, beginning to yield, or about to accelerate from a stop.

So Ford outfitted a Transit Connect van with a light bar placed on the windshield. To simulate a fully self-driving experience without using an actual autonomous vehicle, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute team developed a way to conceal the driver with a “seat suit.”

The suit creates the illusion of a fully autonomous vehicle, which is necessary to test and evaluate real-world encounters and behaviors. The researchers then went to work experimenting with three light signals to test the communication of the vehicle’s intent:

Yield: Two white lights that move side to side, indicating vehicle is about to yield to a full stop

Active autonomous driving mode: Solid white light to indicate vehicle is driving autonomously

Start to go: Rapidly blinking white light to indicate vehicle is beginning to accelerate from a stop

The simulated autonomous Transit Connect was driven on public roads in northern Virginia – home to a density of traffic and pedestrians – throughout August, with researchers capturing video and logs of pedestrian reactions. More than 150 hours of data over approximately 1,800 miles of driving was collected in an urban environment, including encounters with pedestrians, bicyclists and other drivers. External signals were activated more than 1,650 times at various locations around Arlington, Va., including at intersections, parking lots, garages, airport roadways, and various other locations.

Numerous high-definition cameras mounted in the study vehicle provided a 360-degree view of surrounding areas and captured the behavior of other road users. This data will be valuable to understanding if other road users change their behaviors in response to self-driving vehicles and the signals they employ.

"This work is of value not only to vehicle users and manufacturers, but also to anyone who walks, rides or drives alongside autonomous vehicles in the future,” said Andy Schaudt, project director, Center for Automated Vehicle Systems, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. “We are proud to support Ford in developing this important research.”
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RI Seminar: James McBride : AI, Robotics, and Autonomous Vehicle Development at Ford Motor Company

Streamed live Oct 13, 2017

James McBride, Ph.D.
Senior Technical Leader – Autonomous Vehicles Research & Advanced Engineering
Ford Motor Company
Friday, October 13
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
AI, Robotics, and Autonomous Vehicle Development at Ford Motor Company

Education:
Ph.D. in Physics, University of Michigan
M.S. in Physics, Michigan State University
B.S. in Physics & Mathematics, University of Wisconsin – River Falls

Abstract: This presentation will highlight the history of autonomous vehicle development at Ford Motor Company and elsewhere within the industry, with an emphasis on discussing some of the difficult remaining challenges to be solved. Additionally, examples illustrating the broader range of potential applications for AI and Robotics within the transportation industry will be touched upon.

Bio: Dr. McBride has been a member of the Research Staff at Ford Motor Company since 1984, and is presently the Senior Technical Leader for Autonomous Vehicles. More than a decade ago, he founded Ford’s research program in vehicular autonomy as a means to enhance safety and mobility within the automotive industry. Notably, he led one of a select few teams to the finals of both the Desert and Urban DARPA Grand Challenges, watershed events in the rapid advancement of autonomous technologies.

Although Dr. McBride is nominally a solid-state physicist with expertise in sensing techniques involving lasers and optics, he has also worked on a wide variety of topics such as nuclear physics, alternative energy devices, exhaust-gas catalysis, crystallography, and superconductivity. Over the course of his career, he has collaborated on projects with numerous national laboratories, governmental agencies, universities, and corporations, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and presented more than 100 invited talks.
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Ford CTO Ken ​Washington on AI and self-driving | Recode Decode Live

Published on Apr 4, 2019

Kara Swisher sat down with Ford CTO Ken Washington to talk about investments into autonomous driving, including the array of technical, political, and philosophical challenges the automobile giant must address as the technology heads into the mainstream.

The interview was recorded as a live Recode Decode podcast in Washington, DC.
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Autonomous 1965 Ford Mustang hillclimb at Goodwood Festival of Speed - Day 2 am

Published on Apr 5, 2019

Autonomous 1965 Ford Mustang hillclimb at Goodwood Festival of Speed - Day 2 - morning run with Lee Dryden interview with commentators
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Three years in our first self-driving city: the Ford journey in Miami-Dade

Mar 1, 2021

Three years since it first began testing self-driving vehicles in Miami-Dade, Ford has made significant progress in preparation of launching a commercial self-driving service.

What have we been up to? Take a look and see how things started... and how they're going today.
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"Ford: three years of testing self-driving cars in Miami"
Automotive manufacturer Ford Motor Company celebrates its three year milestone testing self-driving cars in Miami

by Georgia Wilson
March 3, 2021
 

The new Ford Motor Company Robotics Building at the University of Michigan College of Engineering

Mar 16, 2021

As robots and autonomous systems are poised to become part of our everyday lives, the University of Michigan and Ford are opening a one-of-a-kind facility where they’ll develop robots and roboticists that help make lives better, keep people safer and build a more equitable society.

U-M’s Ford Motor Company Robotics Building is a four-story, $75 million, 134,000-square-foot complex situated on North Campus. Its first three floors hold custom U-M research labs for robots that fly, walk, roll and augment the human body—as well as classrooms, offices and makerspaces. Through a unique agreement, the fourth floor houses Ford’s first mobility research lab on a university campus, as well as 100 Ford researchers and engineers.
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"U-Michigan, Ford open world-class robotics complex"
The facility will accelerate the future of advanced and more equitable robotics and mobility

by Nicole Casal Moore
March 16, 2021

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
 
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