Regulatory & security perspectives of autonomous drive

During our last Autonomous Vehicles event in Silicon Valley we caught up with one of our expert speakers, Grayson Brulte, he is the Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Autonomous Vehicle Task Force for the City of Beverly Hills.

During the event he spoke on topics that included:

• Autonomy is here: what does this mean for city architecture?
• Roads, Bridges, Maps, Parking? All the changes instigated by autonomous passenger vehicles
• Funding and Implementation: Who takes the lead and who foots the bill for a smarter city?

How do you picture the future of mobility?

“It will be an autonomous future. It will be a future that is connected and autonomous. There will be multimodal transportation, and there will be two seater, one seater and 15 seater.

And all different forms of transportation that we currently have today will come together autonomously and operate in a network. So if you are going to the grocery store you will be able to summon an SUV to put your groceries in. If you’re going to the beach you will be able to summon a convertible, and everything will work together on a network through a master platform.”

What are some of the current challenges within the autonomous vehicles space?

“The biggest current challenge today is a patchwork of regulations where today its very difficult for an autonomous vehicle to go over state, county and city lines. We need to arrive at a national framework when an autonomous vehicle can go from Los Angeles to New York autonomously.

From a technical standpoint we are getting there. The technology is still maturing, and at some point over the next two to three years we will get there and have fully level five vehicles on the road.”

What are you excited for in the coming years as sensors improve, regulations change and advancements in autonomous technology continue?

“I’m really excited to see the continues breakthrough in LIDAR technology. Where Alphabet's Waymo was recently able to lower the price of a single LIDAR unit from $75,000 to $7,500.

So as LIDAR becomes more commonplace and is used continuously across the board it will be really fascinating to watch as the price of LIDAR falls how fast the speed up will be with autonomous vehicles.”

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As automaker move quickly towards the development of autonomous vehicles. Is there a specific combination of technologies that will help progress autonomous driving?

“I think the biggest breakthrough is going to come in LIDAR and deep learning networks. Six months ago everything had to be pre-mapped. Today that is no longer true as we move towards deep learning and artificial intelligence.

As NVIDIA continues to innovate and develop these new chips, as individuals such as George Hops continues to write incredible code, and when we get to the point we can train a car to think and learn on its own that’s going to be very special.”

What are regulators current perspective in this space?

“They are between a rock and a hard place. They can’t make a right decision or wrong decision, and are just playing it super safe. And we are going to have to get to a point where regulators say okay this is coming, and there is nothing we can do from a regulation standpoint to slow down this technology.

We have to work together with the autonomous vehicle in the street, the cities and states to craft policy that will work for everyone involved.”