Let’s Talk Self-Driving

For all of the talk of regulatory hurdles decelerating autonomous vehicle development, there are important swaths of society that are highly motivated to accelerate adoption.

Waymo is joining several of these groups into a coalition called Let’s Talk Self-Driving.

“Let’s Talk Self-Driving represents a diverse set of communities coming together with the shared belief that self-driving vehicles can save lives, improve independence, and create new mobility options for all.”

Some of the prominent organizations in the coalition include the American Automobile Association, Mother’s Against Drunk Driving, and Foundation for Blind Children.

The website amalgamates lots of information that Waymo has previously shared in other formats, targeted toward reassuring communities that autonomous vehicles are safe.

Educating community groups seems like a smart regulatory strategy. Autonomous vehicles are going to improve the lives of lots of people. That will be especially true for groups that face challenges with current transportation options.

Mobilizing those groups to advocate for change is likely to be more effective than putting engineers front and center in the regulatory spotlight.

Indeed’s Autonomous Vehicle Jobs Report

Indeed, the world’s largest job search engine, reports that Aptiv is posting far and away the most self-driving car job openings. Aptiv spun out from Delphi, a Tier 1 auto supplier, a few years ago. They also acquired nuTonomy, which at the time of acquisition had logged more self-driving car miles than all but a handful of competitors.

Following Aptiv on the list is NVIDIA, and then SAIC Innovation Center (the Chinese auto supplier, not the US government contractor of the same acronym).

It would be interesting to get an absolute number of jobs from this report, rather than a percentage. When I search Indeed for jobs at SAIC Innovation Center, I only see a handful of listings. But maybe the number has waxed and waned over time.

Bosch and Daimler, which are partnering hand and glove on autonomous technology, come in at 4 and 5.

Meanwhile, Cruise Automation, which is has plastered hiring billboards up and down highway 101 in Silicon Valley, only rings at number 6, followed by GM.

The rankings don’t really match my intuition of who is hiring and how much, but presumably Indeed has data that I don’t.

The report also lists the top geographies for these jobs.

Silicon Valley — Technically this covers two places on the list: #1 San Jose and #4 San Francisco. A combination of Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Google, and a lot of venture capital and software engineers has made this the new center of robotics.

Pittsburgh — Carnegie Mellon University has spawned a bunch of corporate robotics teams, notably Uber ATG, Argo AI and Aurora.

Detroit — The center of the automotive industry, dating back to Henry Ford.

Portland — I assume this is mainly on the list due to Daimler Trucks?

Boston — MIT has not spun out quite as many robotics efforts as CMU, but nuTonomy counts for a lot, and there are other groups, too.

Toyota Now Owns 20% Of Subaru

My wife drives a Subaru Crosstrek, which she loves. I too, appreciate Subaru’s dependability, particularly in snow. All Subarus are all-wheel drive, so the brand is a go-to choice for people who like to head to the mountains, as I do.

I also admire Subaru’s Eyesight driver assistance system. The stock adaptive cruise control works perfectly. The lane departure warning system works fine for what it does, although I wish it had improved more over the last few years. And it would be great if Subaru supported over-the-air updates to improve the system over time.

Toyota obviously sees something in Subaru, as well, since the larger manufacturer just increased its ownership stake in Subaru to 20%.

The logic is apparently to provide Subaru access to Toyota’s hybrid technology. In fact, Subaru already uses this technology for its new plug-in hybrid Crosstrek. Supposedly there is a parallel plug-in hybrid Impreza that is available only in Japan.

Meanwhile, Subaru will provide Toyota with insight into both all-wheel drive and driver assistance systems.

In more personal news, on Monday I’m supposed to receive the Subaru giraffe for use with the Comma EON. If OpenPilot works on the Crosstrek as well as it has on the Toyota’s I’ve tested, I’ll be tempted to buy my own Crosstrek plug-in hybrid 🙂

Self-Driving Cars for the Chinese Public

Baidu’s Apollo program has announced a self-driving car test in Changsha, Hunan, China, that is open to the general public. The program features 45 self-driving L4 Hongqi EV vehicles, the result of a joint partnership with FAW Group.

It’s always a little hard to know exactly what’s happening in China, because the non-Chinese press struggles with both access and language. The articles I’ve read use phrases like, “debuted”, “are being released”, and “kicked off”. Sounds like the program is already underway?

There is a human safety driver onboard, of course, and the geofence is limited to about 30 miles, although Baidu intends to expand.

Self-driving car deployments are trickling out, albeit not quite as fast as many of us had hoped. Opening up programs to the general public, as opposed to a limited and pre-screened group, is a big step forward.

I’m excited that Baidu is doing this. And I would love to see a video or writeup of what it’s like.

Nanodegree Programs To Jobs

I came to Udacity three years ago to build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. Since then, we’ve had thousands of students enroll in and graduate the program, and we’ve built other Nanodegree programs:

Udacity builds all of its programs with the goal of helping students get jobs and advance in their careers.

This week Levi Sumagaysay at the San Jose Mercury News published an article about how Nanodegree programs lead to jobs, particularly in the exciting world of autonomous vehicles. It’s awesome to make the hometown paper 📰

Female Automotive Leaders

My Udacity colleagues Leah Wiedenmann and Vienna Harvey compiled a list of female leaders in the automotive industry. Their goal is to help more conferences invite female speakers.

I imagine this list will be helpful to journalists and researchers, as well.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DVxzLiwSfrRsoHQmYoU0Db7_WDy4ZUOwsWZBmjkW7IA/edit?usp=sharing

What Are Flying Cars?

My Udacity colleague, Michele Cavaioni, has written a post about flying cars. You should read it!

Michaele has worked extensively with our Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer Nanodegree Program and knows his stuff. In this post, he focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of rotary versus fixed-wing aircraft.

You might be able to deduce the strengths and weaknesses of each modality from these nifty graphics, but you should read the whole post for more 😊 🚁 ✈️

Autonomous Delivery Vehicles Are Big In China And The USA

“Neolix, a start-up so Chinese that it has only barely has an English-language website, has announced mass-production of its autonomous delivery vehicles and declared itself the first company in the world to do this, according to Bloomberg.”

Read my post at Forbes.com to learn much more.

The Chinese aspect of this signifies a number of things:

China is a big enough market that many start-up don’t need to really look outside
But Neolix says it is talking to international customers
It’s hard for me, as an American, to evaluate automotive news coming from China

Radar-Based High-Definition Maps

Automotive News has a cool article about different advances in automotive radar for autonomous vehicles. The article makes the point that radar has been a little bit like the forgotten sensor:

“Perhaps radar is even underappreciated. Venture capital has flowed into lidar and camera-based solutions for automated vehicles; radar has been viewed as a commodity.”

That seems right to me.

The article highlights three companies working on different approaches to more advanced radar for self-driving cars. The work from Bosch to create radar-based high-definition maps seems particularly interesting.

“By coupling these two inputs [radar and GPS], Bosch’s system can take that real-time data and compare it to its base map, match patterns between the two, and determine its location with centimeter-level accuracy.”

Bosch calls this approach, “radar road signature” and posits that it can provide centimeter-level accuracy while using half as much data as a camera-based map.

Bosch is highlighting their work with TomTom to build radar-based HD maps. They divide these maps into three layers:

Localization: calculating where the car is in the world
Planning: deciding which actions are available to the car
Dynamic: predicting what other actors in the environment will do

This is exciting work because high-definition (HD) maps are usually the domain of lidar. Lidar point clouds are used to generate maps against which a vehicle can compare later sensor readings.

Some work has gone into attempts to build such maps with camera data. Visual SLAM is one example of this. By comparison, relatively little work has gone into building HD maps from radar data. That makes Bosch’s endeavor novel and exciting.

Bosch is positioning this as a fleet-based mapping system, with map data generated by ordinary consumer cars, not necessarily specialized mapping vehicles. It’s hard to know how realistic that really is, but it would play to Bosch’s strength of scale.

“One million vehicles will keep the high-resolution map up to date.”

As the world’s largest automotive supplier, Bosch has a unique ability to pump a success into the automotive market.

Robots On Foot Are Harder Than Robots on Wheels

Ford CTO Ken Washington, who used to be like my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss when I was at Ford, and seems like a great guy, has a post up about Digit, a humanoid robot that Ford is working on for last-mile deliveries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHWciIxNK2c

Reading the post and watching the video, I have a few reactions:

This is awesome.
This will be insanely hard.
Giving a robot a lidar for a head is a stroke of genius, at least from an aesthetic perspective.

Ford is completely right that the last-mile (really, last-ten-yards) delivery problem is going to be a huge issue. Right now logistics companies rely on drivers to both operate a vehicle and to walk deliveries to customers’ front doors. Self-driving cars solve the first problem, but in a lot of cases that won’t ultimately have much of an impact if we can’t solve the second task.

So the motivation for Digit is spot-on.

But walking robots are bananas-level difficult.

Look no further than this video with the awesome title, “A Compilation of Robots Falling Down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge”:

Granted, this video is from 4 years ago and progress has been made, but my impression is that walking robots make self-driving cars look like an easy problem.

I remember taking an edX course from Russ Tedrake at MIT called “Underactuated Robotics” that was concerned with, among other things, walking robots. This course was so, so hard. The control problems inherent in a multi-joint, walking robot are of a staggering level of mathematical complexity.

Digit’s demo video is awesome, but we’ve all learned to be skeptical of demo videos. If Ford, together with Agility Robotics, can really crack the nut on a walking robot that can deliver packages, then they won’t even need to solve the autonomous vehicle problem. They’ll have the whole world beating down their door.