Category: Uncategorized

Tesla Deprecates “Full Self-Driving” Term

For the past two years or so, Tesla has provided a “full self-driving” option on its vehicles. The option cost $5,000.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced new mid-range options for the Model 3 this week, and the associated design website renames the “Full Self-Driving” feature to “Enhanced Autopilot”.

In a tweet, Musk said:

I am a bit confused by the meaning of Musk’s tweet. Is “full self-driving” actually still available, on an alternate menu? Does he mean “full self-driving” has been unavailable for week?

The simplest explanation seems to be that Tesla decided to rebrand their Autopilot feature.

A lot of people have been skeptical about the ability of Tesla to create a fully autonomous vehicle with only cameras and one radar and no lidar. Perhaps this is a nod in that direction.

Autopilot is still the best ADAS system on the market, though.

Udacity Festival 2018 This Weekend

Udacity Festival 2018 is coming this weekend!

This is an online event for Udacity students and alumni to learn from and connect with each other, as well as to hear from Udacity staff. Since Udacity is an online education institution with students all around the world, this is a virtual event, taking place online throughout the weekend.

The Festival will feature:

“Presentations covering everything from pitching projects and landing new jobs, to career change and entrepreneurial success.

Exclusive digital meetups for each Udacity school — Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems, Business, Data Science, and Programming.

Panel discussions with alumni sharing their career advancement strategies.
… and so much more!”

As a teaser, the School of Autonomous Systems event will feature a ride in Carla, Udacity’s self-drivng car!

As if that weren’t enough, I will engage is a special round of Carla Karaoke. You will not believe my closing number. Like, literally, you will not believe it. You will watch me sing it and still will not believe I chose this song.

RSVP here!

Self-Driving Ships

The Verge reports on a partnership between Intel and Rolls-Royce to build “self-driving” ships. The article blends discussion of three different scenarios:

  1. autonomous long-haul shipping
  2. remote-control operation
  3. pilot assistance for docking and similar scenarios

I have almost no knowledge of shipping or boats or the ocean or even water. I do know how to swim.

Nonetheless, I speculate that #3 seems the most useful.

The gains achieved by removing a human crew from a cargo ship seem minimal. In the context of a massive shipping vessel stuffed with rectangular containers, the cost of the human crew just doesn’t seem that significant.

But in the context of the close quarters of a harbor or port, I can imagine that there might be substantial performance gains from automation or pilot assistance.

Again, knowing not much about the actual constraints of maritime shipping, I could imagine harbors as bottlenecks, where ships get queued up in lines, waiting for relatively scarce tugboats and harbor pilots. Furthermore, ships do not turn on a dime, and so presumably need to maintain substantial buffer distances.

Autonomous shipping in close quarters might improve both the latency of docking (by allowing ships to skip the line) and the throughput (by allowing ships to shrink buffer distances).

TiE Autonomous Vehicles Panel

Come join me next Tuesday, October 9, at the TiE Silicon Valley panel on the Future of Autonomous Vehicles!

The panel will be from 5:30pm — 8:30pm in Sunnyvale, California, at the offices of Micro Focus. It’s quite a lineup they’ve assembled:

  • David Hall: Founder and CEO of Velodyne
  • Manji Suzuki: VP at Denso
  • Ashish Karandikar: VP at NVIDIA
  • Qasar Younis: Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition
  • Vijay Nadkarni: VP at Visteon
  • Hyunggi Cho: Founder and CEO of Phantom AI

If you want to learn what is going on at the cutting-edge of self-driving cars in Silicon Valley, this seems like the place to do it. I’m excited myself to learn what the other panelists have to say about the future of autonomous vehicles!

Register here đźš—

Honda Invests in GM Cruise

Honda is investing a cool $2.75 billion dollars in GM’s Cruise Automation subsidiary, diversifying the Japanese auto manufacturer’s investments in self-driving cars. Earlier this year, Honda also announced a partnership with Waymo to build self-driving cars.

The Honda-GM transaction places a staggering $14.6 billion valuation on privately-held Cruise Automation.

Joann Muller at Axios writes that the centerpiece of this deal (besides the cash) is Honda’s interior design expertise.

“Honda brings unique engineering talents, especially when it comes to the efficient use of interior vehicle space…Ever look inside a Honda Fit? You’ll be shocked how much room there is inside such a tiny car…getting the user experience right is the ultimate engineering challenge. Honda is the perfect partner.”

There have been a lot of concept cars in the press, highlighting what designs might be possible for self-driving cars. These concepts often strike me as similar to the fashion designs that roll down New York runways — interesting conceptually, but a far cry from the designs that will hit the mass market. So I’m excited to see what Cruise-GM-Honda rolls out for real passengers.

IKEA Imagines Self-Driving Offices!

The happiest self-driving news I have read in a long time is that IKEA is imagining our future self-driving world. That’s right — the autonomous future is balsa wood, tiny hex wrenches, and pictographic assembly instructions.

Somewhat more specifically, the concepts are developed by Space10, a Danish design lab with confusing connections to IKEA. Space10 itself doesn’t seem to mention IKEA on its website. But IKEA published a 2016 blog post in which it refers to Space10 as its “secret design lab.”

In any case, the concepts include:

  • Office on Wheels
  • Cafe on the Go
  • Mobile Healthcare
  • Farm Fresh Delivery
  • Augmented Reality Joyride
  • Sleepover Hotel on Wheels
  • Pop-Up Store

Check it out!

Riding a Self-Driving Shuttle in Edmonton

I love seeing a new self-driving vehicle hit the streets that the general public can ride. So I am excited to read about ELA, a shuttle powered by EasyMile.

Ela is testing this month in the great Canadian north — Edmonton and Calgary, Aberta. It’s a limited time trial, but the good news is that anybody can sign up.

All you have to do is get to Edmonton. It’s a hike, but they have an awesome mall there.

Full Self-Driving Teslas

“Musk wrote in an email obtained by Bloomberg News that Tesla needed about 100 more employees to join an internal testing program linked to rolling out the full self-driving capability. Any worker who buys a Tesla and agrees to share 300 to 400 hours of driving feedback with the company’s Autopilot team by the end of next year won’t have to pay for full self-driving — an $8,000 saving — or for a premium interior, which normally costs $5,000, Musk wrote.”

Full story here.

This is so exciting!

On the other hand, as CleanTechnica reminds, Tesla has struggled to fulfill Autopilot promises in the past. So take with a grain of salt.

Navimotive Conference in Ukraine

Last week I had the honor of making my first trip to Kiev, Ukraine, to speak at Navimotive, the largest autonomous vehicle conference in Eastern Europe.

It is so exciting to meet software engineers from all over the world who are working on autonomous vehicles. This is particularly true Ukraine and other geographies that are new participants in the world of autonomous vehicles.

The event was hosted by Intellias, an automotive software firm with over 1,000 engineers. It is fantastic that there are engineers in places like Kiev and Lviv and Odesa working in C++ on similar problems as engineers in Bavaria or Detroit or Silicon Valley or China or India. Self-driving cars truly are going global.

The speakers came from around the globe, including:

Many other international and Ukrainian companies were present as well.

My hope is that in the next few years self-driving cars will become as visible in Kiev as they are in Mountain View, and that engineers from all over the world have the opportunity to contribute to that future!