Cruise Acquires Voyage!

Cruise CTO and co-founder Kyle Vogt, left, with Voyage CEO and co-founder, Oliver Cameron, right

Voyage announced today that Cruise is acquiring us! I am excited to join one of the largest and most advanced companies working on self-driving cars.

A few months ago, I moved from Udacity to Voyage, in large part because so many of my former Udacity colleagues were at Voyage. Now we are moving together to Cruise, to work with a much larger team putting robotaxis on the road.

My brief time with Voyage has been delightful, and I hope to enjoy Cruise just as much. More to come!

“After being intimately involved with the AV industry for the last five years, I can say with certainty that Cruise — with its advanced self-driving technology, unique auto-maker partnerships, and all-electric purpose-built vehicle with no human controls — is poised to be the clear leader.”
Oliver Cameron

Conversation With Vishwas Narayan

More Waymo Challenges!

Waymo has expanded their Open Dataset to include prediction data, and they’ve posed a new set of challenges for the public to tackle.

Motion prediction challenge: Given agents’ tracks for the past 1 second on a corresponding map, predict the positions of up to 8 agents for 8 seconds into the future.

Interaction prediction challenge: Given agents’ tracks for the past 1 second on a corresponding map, predict the joint future positions of 2 interacting agents for 8 seconds into the future.

Real-time 3D detection: Given lidar range images and their associated camera images, produce a set of 3D upright boxes for the objects in the scene, with a latency requirement.

Real-time 2D detection: Given a set of camera images, produce a set of 2D boxes for the objects in the scene, with a latency requirement.

What’s more, they published an academic paper describing how they automated the labeling of the data.

Submissions to the challenges are due on May 31.

Tesla Is Definitely Still Using Maps

For my latest Forbes article, I pondered Tesla’s use of maps, and how they communicate the need for maps to regulators and to the public.

Tesla’s use of pre-defined maps for its ADAS features has long be ambiguous and tied up in Elon Musk’s disdain for lidar, which is the principal tool for building high-definition maps.

Nonetheless, recently released communication between Tesla and the California Department of Motor Vehicles reveals that mapping is a central component of several Full Self-Driving features.

Read the whole thing.

Pythagorean Theorem

For the first fifteen years of my career in software, I barely used algebra. Web development requires plenty of abstract reasoning, but not higher math. Since working on autonomous vehicles, however, I constantly find myself revisiting topics I last touched in high school.

Pythagorean Theorem is a great example.

a*a + b*b = c*c

When on earth would you actually use this in “real life?” A few years ago I might have said never. Now I use it all the time.

Imagine I’m trying to calculate a vehicle’s acceleration, and the sensors tells me it’s accelerating 1 meter per second in the x-direction and 0.5 meters per second in the y-direction. What is the acceleration in the vehicle’s own frame of reference?

I’d use Pythagorean Theorem to find the answer. You can try it with an online calculator. What’d you get?

Tesla Autosteer Cut Accident Rates By 40% [Update: Maybe The Opposite!]

[Update: On Twitter, Michael DeKort points to an Ed Niedermeyer story in The Drive that suggests NHTSA’s data and analysis were flawed and Tesla Autosteer may actually have increased accidents.]

Yesterday I wrote that 2020 traffic deaths showed a big increase over previous years, probably due to distracted driver (cell phones). At the end of the post, I wondered whether advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are helping or hurting this situation.

I did some very light Internet searching today, and the most information I could find is this NHTSA report from 2016, which states:

“The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.”

In addition to this, I found some sporadic reports of Autopilot-related insurance discounts from Tesla owners and small insurance companies.

This isn’t a lot to go on — the data are dated (I forgot that “Autosteer” was a feature name), and mentioned off-hand in a NHTSA report that is really about AEB deployment. More importantly, there’s no data for ADAS options other than Tesla. Tesla is a small and controversial portion of the ADAS market.

But it’s the data I found so far.

Traffic Deaths Way Up In 2020

The National Safety Council estimates that US traffic fatalities were way up in 2020, which is even more shocking considering how many fewer miles were driven, due to the pandemic.

Total fatalities increased to ~42,000, and the number of miles per fatality was ~670,000. For years I have quoted 35,000 fatalities per year and one fatality per 100,000 million miles, both in the US. But those numbers are firmly behind us, since both metrics have been deteriorating for the past few years.

This year’s absolute number of fatalities is the highest since 2007.

The current report doesn’t speculate as to the cause of the increase, although previously the NSC has cited distracted driving due to cell phone use as an important and relatively new factor in accident rates.

I would love to see data on whether ADAS systems like Tesla Autopilot and GM SuperCruise improve fatality rates, by compensating for distracted drivers, or worsen them, by lulling drivers into a false sense of security.

I.D. Buzz

Volkswagen has released a rendering of its 2025 self-driving car, which will be based on the ID. Buzz electric vehicle platform, which itself is a re-imagining of the iconic VW Bus. The autonomy software stack will come from Argo, which Volkswagen partially owns.

A major notable feature of this vehicle is that it is uni-directional with front-facing seats. In this respect, it resembles Waymo’s active driverless vehicles, which are based on the FCA Pacifica minivan platform, and the Jaguar I-PACE SUV platform. In contrast, both Cruise and Zoox have announced new vehicle platforms, specifically designed for autonomy, that are bi-directional, with no front or rear.

Just as the original automobiles were “horseless carriages”, designed to resemble horse-drawn carriages, it makes sense both that early self-driving vehicles would resemble traditional automobiles, and also that we will soon find form-factors more conducive to a driverless vehicle. What that more conducive form factor is, remains to be decided.

Driverless Waymo Jaguar I-PACE (now in black!)

Cruise Origin, designed from the ground up for autonomy

Hot Job: Learn Rust At QBio

My friend and former Udacity boss, Clarissa Shen, leads Q Bio, which built a next-generation medical imaging system that give patients autonomy and visibility into their own health.

Clarissa just alerted me to a hot job Q Bio has posted: Embedded Software Lead. This line from the job description particularly struck me:

Ability to write production level code in C and C++… Once you’re onboard, you’ll be expected you to learn Rust

I have wanted to learn Rust for the last several years, and the idea of getting a job where I would be paid to learn Rust is super-duper appealing. I would apply for the job myself, except I love Voyage so much that I definitely couldn’t leave here.

The Rust programming language emerged from Mozilla, and is supposed to be similar to C++, with many of the same high-performance characteristics, but with superior memory-handling and concurrency support. Supposedly it’s like modern C++, but even easier to pull off would otherwise be super advanced programming techniques.

“Rust has been voted the ‘most loved programming language’ in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016.” — Wikipedia

If you want to improve medical care and health outcomes, and get paid to learn Rust, apply here and also email your CV to me at dsilver829@gmail.com. I’ll put you in touch with Clarissa (who is great, by the way!)

Smart Mailboxes And Drone Delivery

One of the perks of contributing to Forbes.com is getting to talk to under-the-radar startups. This week, I spoke with and wrote about Valqari, a Chicago-based startup working on smart mailboxes for drone delivery.

We should all have smart mailboxes!

“Our next generation will come out in July, we’ll also be launching individual boxes, and adding solar power, wireless drone recharging, and more robust temperature control to our feature set,” Walsh previews. “It’s going to be a busy year for us.”

Read the whole thing!