Category: Uncategorized

Pony.AI Launches China’s First Robotaxi Service

Add Guangzho, China, to the list of places where the general public can ride in self-driving cars, according to TechCrunch.

Autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai has become the first company to operate an autonomous ride-hailing service on public roads for public users in China. The company, just over a year-old, recently raised $112 million in a Series A round to help it accelerate its efforts, and its fleet is running a nearly two-mile route in Nansha, Guangzhou, where its China HQ is located.

Between Baidu’s Apollo project, Didi self-driving robotaxi work, Momenta’s deep learning efforts, BYTON’s plans for electrics self-driving cars, and now Pony.AI, China is becoming a key player in the race toward autonomous vehicles.

Interestingly, Pony’s fleet includes: “four Lincoln MKZs, as well at two Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) Chuanqis.”

I wonder if the MKZs came from AutonomouStuff.

Update: Several commenters have pointed out, I think correctly, that with only six cars operating on a very short, fixed route, this isn’t really a “robotaxi” service. More like a proof of concept. Still a big step!

Toyota Research Institute — Advanced Development

The Silicon Valley office of Toyota Research Institute is within a long walk of Udacity’s headquarters in Mountain View, but they’ve been pretty quite about what they’re up to.

News today is that Toyota is creating a sister organization, based in Japan, called Toyota Research Institute — Advanced Development. TRI-AD will be headquartered in Tokyo as a partnership between Toyota and suppliers Aisin and Denso. Although Toyota is putting up 90% of the money.

Although the business will be located in Tokyo, it’s CEO will be current TRI CTO and former CMU professor James Kuffner, the chairman will be current TRI CEO Gil Pratt and former MIT professor Gil Pratt. And the language of TRI-AD is going to be English.

“This company’s mission is to accelerate software development in a more effective and disruptive way, by augmenting the Toyota Group’s capability through the hiring of world-class software engineers,” [says Kuffner].

It appears Toyota is setting up TRI as the pure research division and TRI-AD as the bridge to production, since TRI-AD will be in Japan and closer to Toyota’s main production facilities.

Oh, and did I mention they’re committing an additional $3 billion dollars to this?

Deep Learning Workshop in Berlin

Next Wednesday, March 7, I’ll be holding a workshop on Deep Learning for Autonomous Vehicles as part of the Automotive Tech.AD conference in Berlin. My colleague Aaron Brown and I will walk participants through how to build and train basic convolutional neural networks for traffic sign recognition.

The workshop will be similar to what we teach in the Traffic Sign Classifier Project of the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, but in an in-person setting.

If you work in the automotive industry and have read a lot about deep neural networks, but have never built them yourself, this is the workshop for you. You’ll get hands-on experience setting up and training your own classification networks.

Sign up to join us in Berlin!

Udacity Intersect 2018: RSVP Now!

Update: There is a Udacity student discount! Email me directly (david.silver@udacity.com) for the discount code.

Sign up now! Intersect, Udacity’s annual conference on lifelong learning, will be on Tuesday, March 27, at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.

Early bird tickets expire tomorrow!

I am so excited about this conference. Do recognize these four technology power players?

If not, checkout the Intersect Speakers.

And how about these four?

Seriously, if you don’t recognize any of these speakers, stop reading this post and visit the Intersect Speakers page to learn about how they are changing the world.

Did I mention Udacity always keeps a few big announcements up its sleeve for Intersect?

Plus I will be there! I’ll be talking about self-driving cars, and giving rides in Carla, Udacity’s own self-driving car. Have you ridden in self-driving car recently? Come ride in ours.

Get your ticket now so we can see you there 🙂

Next Week in Berlin!

I am excited to be heading to Germany next week!

Stuttgart

On Monday I will be in Stuttgart. Join my Udacity colleagues and me at the Connected Autonomous Vehicle Meetup on March 5, organized by Udacity student Rainer BareiĂź. RSVP here.

Berlin

On Wednesday I will be in Berlin. Join us on March 7 at Udacity’s Berlin office. Free pizza and drinks! I’ll show off some self-driving car videos and share the latest news about what Udacity is building for students. 7–9pm. RSVP here.

Bis bald in Deutschland 🙂

Next Week in Stuttgart

I am excited to head to Germany next week with my Udacity colleagues!

We’ll be in Stuttgart on Monday, March 5, where we’re lucky to be hosted by the Connected Autonomous Driving Meetup. We’ll be holding a joint event with our partners at Bosch, specifically Mirko Franke from their Automated Driving team. 6–9pm at Connectory Stuttgart. Please come!

Later in the week we’ll be in Berlin, where we’ll host an event for Udacity students. More to information to come on that.

Car Washes for Self-Driving Cars

CNN has an amusing story about the difficulty of washing a self-driving car with hundreds of thousands of dollars of sensors bolted on the roof.

The story mainly hooks on Avis and the special cleaning techniques they have contracted to perform for Waymo’s self-driving cars. They have to be really careful!

“For example, soap residue or water spots could effectively “blind” an autonomous car. A traditional car wash’s heavy brushes could jar the vehicle’s sensors, disrupting their calibration and accuracy. Even worse, sensors, which can cost over $100,000, could be broken.

A self-driving vehicle’s exterior needs to be cleaned even more frequently than a typical car because the sensors must remain free of obstructions. Dirt, dead bugs, bird droppings or water spots can impact the vehicle’s ability to drive safely.”

Washing Carla, Udacity’s self-driving car, is less of a challenge, because we can pretty easily dismount the roof-based lidar and store it in the trunk. And our cameras are inside the vehicle.

Still, we take Carla to our local brushless carwash every month, and each time I get a little terrified.

Udacity’s Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree Program

Experience a free preview of our program today, and discover how YOU can enter the amazing world of self-driving cars!

Sebastian Thrun, Udacity founder, and the “Godfather” of Self-Driving Cars

Udacity’s Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree Program is for anyone in the world who ever dreamed of working on self-driving cars, but thought they never could.

This program covers the prerequisite skills necessary to advance to our career-ready Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, including:

  • Intermediate programming ability in C++ or Python (the languages of the autonomous vehicle industry)
  • Basic linear algebra
  • Basic calculus
  • Basic statistics
  • Basic physics

As a student in the Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program, you’ll build your skills up over the course of a four-month curriculum path that tackles each of these areas at a pace that is both manageable and rewarding. Best of all, you’ll practice putting these skills to work on the types of projects that real self-driving car engineers work on every day.

If you love self-driving cars, but thought you’d never get the chance to work on them, then this is the program for you.

Check out a free preview of the program right now!