Yesterday, Zoox unveiled its long-awaited vehicle. It doesnât yet have a name (the Zoox website lists it simply as, âVEHICLEâ), although the press describes it as a âcarriageâ, at least in form factor. It resembles the Cruise Origin more than a little bit, including the glass elevator-style doors.
Zoox has done some amazing technical work with this vehicle. Most notably, the vehicle supposedly moves it not only forward and backward, like a normal car, but also side-to-side, like a dolley.
That said, I am a little skeptical about the utility of a four-person passenger vehicle as the true form factor for the self-driving future. Weâre used to four-person vehicles now because consumers have to purchase cars that fill lowest-common-denominator needs. In a transportation-as-a-service world, though, I suspect weâll all want to travel in our own personal vehicles.
They cover AI, transportation, digital medicine, autonomous flight, Udacity, the future of technology, and more. You even get to hear Sebastian talk about a refrigerator flirting with a dishwasher.
(I contributeForbes.com; itâs a stretch to call Steve Forbes my âbossâ. Iâve actually never met Steve Forbes myself, but just go with it.)
I always enjoy learning about new autonomous vehicle companies. Recently I heard from an Israeli startup called Blue White Robotics that is working with lots of different types of autonomous vehicles.
BWR offers an end-to-end service that includes robots, software, operations, and even âboots on the ground.â Their website has photos of drones and autonomous shuttles and self-driving cars, alongside business objectives that range from agricultural pollination to medical transportation to HAZMAT.
Their website sizes the company at 60 employees, which implies a fairly large existing operational portfolio.
Like Bestmile, the goal for Blue White Robotics appears to be a multi-modal platform that customers can configure for their specific needs. A little bit like âAWS for autonomy.â
This is a big goal and I am excited to see companies like BWR aiming for it.
Although neither Amazon nor Walmart are known first and foremost as self-driving companies, they both have been doing a lot of work in the space. But they have been doing that work differently. Amazon has been investing while Walmart has been partnering.
Today is my first day as a motion control engineer at Voyage. Iâm so excited!
Voyage came into being years ago as part of Udacity. Oliver Cameron, Voyageâs co-founder and CEO, was my first manager at Udacity. The rest of Voyageâs founding team were my colleagues when I joined Udacity in 2016. Iâm thrilled to join them again to work on self-driving cars.
Over the past four years, I have been so impressed by Voyageâs progress. They are now on their third-generation vehicle, and they are already testing a fully driverless autonomous stack.
My role at Voyage will be on the motion control team, which handles steering, acceleration, and deceleration. Itâs the âactâ part of the âsense-plan-actâ robotics cycle. This should be a lot of fun!
One of the most attractive aspects of joining Voyage was the ability to make a big impact on a lot of different parts of the autonomy stack, and I hope to work on many different components over time. Keep an eye out!
This fall has been big for driverless launches: first Waymo, then Cruise, and now a bunch more. The fact that a slow tractor feels like no big deal is a testament to the quiet progress the industry has made recently.
After four and a half years, today is my last day at Udacity. On Monday, I will return to my roots in core self-driving car engineering. Iâm excited!
Udacity has been the most successful and fun experience of professional life. I leave with memories of amazing students, terrific colleagues, and work of which I am proud.
I am so grateful to Sebastian Thrun and the Udacity team for recruiting me here in 2016. Together we built the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, which has trained thousands of autonomous vehicle engineers, along many other amazing programs an courses, ranging from artificial intelligence to data science to web development to cloud computing, and beyond.
This small collection of photos captures a few of my many wonderful experiences with this amazing company.
The 2016 SDC Pre-Launch Dashboard!Launching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2016!Finding Lane Linesâââthe first Self-Driving Car ProjectRyan Keenan building Self-Driving Car projectsThe first Self-Driving Car Team Retreat in Pajaro DunesMeeting Udacity students in DetroitWe won the first Udaciward!Meeting Udacity students in TokyoUdaciward Outing: NASCAR in SonomaTeaching with Lufthansaâs FlyingLab at 30,000 feet!Filming the final video!We finished the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program!Graduation!Brok and the team went crazy for my birthday!Autonomous Day at the Porsche Experience CenterInterviewing Sebastian Thrun for Udacity TalksWorking with the Infosys self-driving golf cart in Mysore, India!Filming with the Baidu Apollo teamTeaching self-driving cars at the Navimotive Conference in Ukraine!Presenting at NIO House in HangzhouSouth by Southwest!The last School of Autonomous Systems Team Retreat, in San Francisco!Interviewing C++ creator Bjarne StroustrupLive Teaching Samples!Curriculum Team Q4 2019 Retreat in the redwoodsThe Curriculum Team escaped!Super Chris Vasquez!We completed Los Pollos Hermanos Employee Training!Ask Me Anything!Farewell Karaoke!
Udacity is full of such wonderful people! My colleagues made me an amazing farewell video đ
Iâm a little self-conscious about sharing it, because itâs hardly modest. But the video is a tour in and of itself through my time at Udacity, and it makes me so happy and proud.
If you pay attention, you can even get some hints about what Iâll be up to next đ
Waymo has just published a lot of information about the safety and validation of its sytemsâââmore than I have yet reviewed. At the top level is a blog post in which Waymo breaks its safety analysi s into three parts:
Hardware
Software
Operations
Within each of those parts is a fair bit more detail and structure, more than I have seen in the past. For example, regarding hardware:
A vehicle equipped with the Waymo Driver has four main subsystems, which form the âhardware layerâ. This includes the vehicle itself; the systems used for steering and driving; the sensor suite built into the vehicle; and the computational platform used to run our software.
Undergirding these descriptions are three documents:
Safety Report. This is 48 pages of glossy material that seems similar to material Waymo has published in the past. Thereâs a lot of data, but the audience seems to be more for the public and policymakers, rather than engineers and analysts.
Safety Methodologies and Safety Readiness Determinations. This looks neat. Lots more detail on the three layers of Waymoâs stack (hardware, software, operations). Lighter detail on how Waymo determines the safety readiness of the layers.
Waymo Public Road Safety Performance Data. Academic-style analysis of Waymo self-driving data from the Phoenix metro area in 2019. Unsurprisingly, the collisions recorded tend to be the fault of human drivers in other vehicles, not Waymo AVs. This sentence caught my eye: âThere were 47 contact events that occurred over this time period, consisting of 18 actual and 29 simulated contact events, none of which would be expected to result in severe or life-threatening injuries.â
Iâm excited to read these documents over the coming days and see what they reveal. As Waymo writes in the blog post:
âThere is currently no universally accepted approach for evaluating the safety of autonomous vehiclesâââdespite the efforts of policymakers, researchers and companies building fully autonomous technologies.â
Today I had the privilege of taking over Udacityâs Twitter account to host a 60-minute AMA on robotics and artificial intelligence. Some blasts from my Udacity past even made an appearance đ
Which technical area of the self-driving problem is the most unsolved, and how can students help solve it?
On Wednesday, 10â11am PT, Iâll take over the Udacity Twitter account to host an AMA about robotics and automation in the post-COVID19 world. Or, anything else youâd like to ask!
David Silver 