Course Report: Control of Mobile Robots

The online course I’ve been working on most rigorously of late [although I’m still one week behind 😦 ], is Control of Mobile Robots.

The course is offered via Coursera, and taught by Magnus Egerstedt and his team at Georgia Tech.

I really like this course!

It offers a great introduction to control theory, and hits the right blend of mathematics and applications for me.

We just finished the distinction and relationship between controllability and observability. These are good introductory concepts and they were conveyed at an introductory level, which I think will provide a solid foundation for more advanced courses.

I’ve written previously of my love for Udacity, which has found a great formula for teaching technical courses on its own platform. Coursera has different strengths and weaknesses, and Control of Mobile Robots is a great example of its strengths.

This course is a relatively obscure topic, so Coursera’s partnerships with major universities enable Coursera to bring this course to the world much faster than Udacity’s in-house production model.

Often the cost for this flexibility is that Coursera courses are of uneven quality. But this course has super-high production values, which I think is a result of Georgia Tech’s focus on online education.

Weekend Roundup

Apple and Didi Chuxing: Apple just invested $1 billion in the Chinese ride-sharing company. It’s not clear to me to what extent this is a bet on ride-sharing, China, or self-driving cars.

“The ride-sharing investment barely dents Apple’s war chest, which stood at $232.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of its most recent earnings.”

BMW Self-Driving Car: They plan to launch in 2021. It looks like the Batmobile. “Our goal is already clearly-defined — to be number one in autonomous driving”, said BMW CEO Harald Krueger.

Mobileye Locks In Customers: But they won’t say who they are.

Audi Self-Driving Car Has Manners: Their concept car acts like a human driver — including giving extra space to trucks, and telegraphing (visually) it’s lane changes.

GM Acknowledges Google, Tesla: “GM executive Richard Holman said he and his colleagues once thought self driving cars would become available in 2035 or so. But thanks to the two Silicon Valley companies ‘pushing the envelope,’ he now seems that happening 15 years earlier.”

Ford Smart Mobility LLC

Disclosure: I work in the same building as some of the Ford Smart Mobility LLC staff, but I don’t work in the LLC and I certainly am not speaking for them here. In fact, I’m basically just regurgitating news reported elsewhere.

Design News has a writeup of a panel discussion including a pair of Ford executives, Patrick Ellis and Dave Kaminski.

According to the article, Ford has created Smart Mobility as a means of creating a more nimble organization that functions more like a startup. This is almost straight out of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Ellis also explained why Ford Smart Mobility LLC is excited to work with startups:

Ellis said that Ford sees working with startups as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Larger companies like Ford get access to new, innovative technologies, while startups benefit from Ford’s infrastructure. “Everyone in Silicon Valley is an entrepreneur, everyone has an idea they think is great and can develop and change the world. Which is great — it’s motivation, it’s passion, which is something that you just can’t buy,” Ellis said. “Most of the startups are removed from the traditional OEMs or the Tier 1 suppliers and that’s really one of the things that gives us a brand new scope of opportunity. Instead of the traditional methods that we use to either learn about a technology or start developing it, we’re actually going Tier 2 or lower right in the beginning.” It’s in this space where Ellis said Ford is really finding opportunties to partner with and potentially invest in startups.

So if you are a startup working in the automotive space, Ford would like to work with you!

On-Demand Mobility Is Still Expensive

I needed to get home from work late last night and I didn’t have a car. Cry me a river.

So I went to the Palo Alto train station, only to discover that I had read the train schedule on my phone wrong. The next train wasn’t passing through for another 45 minutes.

So I looked up the cost of a ride-share home. The distance is a hair under 15 miles.

Lyft wouldn’t even quote me a price — apparently the ride was out of their service area.

Uber quoted me a price of $50.

The train is $5. I got two slices of pizza and waited for the train.

Maybe this isn’t a good use of time, running the cost benefit analysis. But it was just hard for me to pull the trigger on a $50 ride home.

Automotive Grade Linux

PCWorld has a quick writeup of a project called Automotive Grade Linux, run by the Linux Foundation.

The goal is straightforward enough — to create a Linux flavor that meets the needs of the automotive industry.

They’re starting with a focus on infotainment consoles, which are the big screens in the center of many modern cars that offer navigation, music, Bluetooth integration, and more.

But the eventual goal is to be the operating system for the entire car.

This is an interesting idea, and analogous to the hardware world. Automotive grade hardware is often a modified version of off-the-shelf hardware, with housing designed for the rough conditions and longer lifetimes required by a car.

One concern I have is whether there will be enough of an ecosystem around AGL. Ubuntu isn’t a perfect solution for cars, but one nice thing about it is that so many people use Ubuntu that the bugs are driven out quickly.

Autonomy and the Law

Crain’s Detroit Business published a story about all of the Michican law firms that are forming autonomous vehicle legal teams to handle this new category of business.

And I can imagine there is lots of new business to get. In particular, the attorney’s quoted in the story talk a lot about connectivity issues. Whereas I might have guessed that the legal issues surrounding autonomy are primarily safety-related, these legal teams think there is a lot of legal work related to transmitting data from the car to the cloud or to other cars.

The geographic angle is also interesting. One of the lawyers mentions that her autonomous vehicle group was formed in response to requests for legal help from startups.

Many of those startups are probably California-based, although the article doesn’t specify.

I’ve written before about the Michigan-California competition for OEMs, but it makes sense that this competition travels all the way up the supply chain.

Land Grab

A major property manager just let slip that both Apple and Google are looking for large spaces, specifically for their autonomous vehicle efforts.

The comments come from Victor Coleman, the CEO of Hudson Pacific Properties, which is apparently a major Bay Area landlord.

The news is a little bit more revelatory for Apple, whose autonomous vehicle efforts have been mysterious to the point that many people (or least I) wonder whether Apple is making any headway.

“We’re seeing the Toyotas of the world, the Teslas of the world, BMWs, Mercedes. Ford now is out in the marketplace looking for space,” he said on the landlord’s quarterly investor call. “I haven’t even mentioned the 400,000 square feet that Google’s looking to take down and the 800,000 square feet that Apple’s looking to take down for their autonomous cars as well.”

That Google is looking for major space isn’t so surprising, given how public they have been about moving their AV team out from under the X umbrella.

GTA V: Google Car

At first I thought this third-party mash-up of the Google Car and Grand Theft Auto would be funny. And I guess it is, sort of.

But it also involves mowing down a lot of virtual pedestrians, which doesn’t seem quite so amusing, although I realize that’s part of the attraction of the GTA franchise.

Maybe I need a better sense of humor?

In any case, it’s worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrPeC1ez-M4

GM and Lyft

GM and Lyft announced that they plan to test self-driving cars on real customers within the next year. That’s a pretty aggressive timeline and a pretty amazing goal.

The reports have been pretty light on details, so there’s not much comment on.

One thought is that this would be awesome.

Another is that I’d love to see some firmer details around this prediction. For example, how many cars will there be and how tightly geo-fenced will the routes be?

I was trying to think of how likely I believe this prediction is to come to pass, but it’s impossible to put a finger on that without firmer details.

A third thought is that this would show a remarkably successful and fast integration of the Cruise acquisition into GM.

My last thought is that asking people take a ride in an autonomous vehicle is probably a smaller lift than asking them to purchase one outright. So this seems like a smart way for Lyft to introduce their AVs.

Ford Invests in Pivotal

Along with the rest of the public, I learned this morning that Ford invested $182.2 million in Pivotal, a software consulting firm with offices worldwide.

I am super-excited about this partnership, although I confess I don’t understand the logic for investing in Pivotal as opposed to simply contracting with them.

But Pivotal is one of the leaders in the craft of software development and in Agile product development, and I think we can learn a lot from them that will make Ford a better place to build software.

In particular, I associate Pivotal with three great software engineering practices:

Pair Programming: Everybody at Pivotal works in pairs, even the non-developers. Two people, two monitors, two keyboards, two mice, one computer.

While some people view this as inefficient, I think it’s hyper-efficient. Most people subscribe to the believe that one great software developer is worth more than two average developers, and maybe more than ten average developers.

Well, pairing together two average developers is kind of like creating one great developer, or at least one very good developer.

Even better, the developers learn from each other and leave the pairing session better than they were when they came in.

Test-Driven Development: Test-Driven Development is the art of writing a software test, then writing the production code to pass the test, and then refactoring the code so that it’s clean. Rinse, repeat.

I have found this to be my favorite way of developing software — it makes hard problems much more tractable and bite-sized.

It’s also a great way to guarantee solid test coverage, much more so than “plain old testing”.

Agile Development: Pivotal is the creator of Pivotal Tracker, a service to track project development, milestones, features, and stories.

Having Pivotal Tracker is not, by itself, a replacement for product managers, but it’s a great tool, and cheaper and faster to get started than hiring a product manager.

Even when I’ve worked as a PM, I’ve found Tracker to be a terrific tool for building software products.