I am a big fan of the team at Uber ATG, and especially of our friends Drew Gray and Lior Ron.
When Udacity launched the Self-Driving Car Program last summer, Otto, which has since become Uber Advanced Technologies Group, was there from the beginning.
They only had 100 people in a semi-deserted warehouse, and not a lot of engineering talent to spare. But they have always been so enthusiastic to spend time teaching students about self-driving cars.
Drew Gray, in particular, is a wonder of an engineer. Whether we need help with deep learning, or control, or tying computer vision to trajectory planning, Drew knows everything and is always excited to help Udacity students.
There’s a wrinkle at the end of one of our Computer Vision projects where we ask students to use lane lines to calculate the radius of curvature of the road. This seems like a weird thing to do, but it ultimately ties into trajectory planning. We only made the leap because Drew pointed it out to us.
Uber has received a lot of criticism recently, and maybe deservedly so. I don’t have much insight into that and you can read better analyses elsewhere.
But I know the folks at Uber ATG, and they have been great partners and great advocates for students who want to get jobs working on autonomous vehicles. And I am grateful for that.
Now would be a good time reiterate something I haven’t posted in a while, which is that this is a personal blog. I have an agenda, which is pretty transparent in my Medium bio. But I don’t speak for Udacity, or CarND students, and certainly not for Udacity partners.
David Silver 