I have a three year-old boy who, like most three year-old boys everywhere, is in love with construction equipment. Heâll watch construction sites for hours. He canât even put on his own socks, but he can distinguish between a dozer, a digger, a front-loader, a crane, and a backhoe.
I stumbled across this writeup of Built Robotics, a San Francisco-based construction equipment maker. Their homepage features a rotating model (I think itâs a model?) of an autonomous dozer. I have to get one of those for my kid.
Itâs interesting that their autonomous dozers feature cabs, although the video on their website shows an operator on foot controlling driver-less equipment via iPad.
Recently, Waymo rolled out fully driverless vehicles to pre-approved riders living in suburban Arizona. Ed Niedermeyer has a great article (and video) in TechCrunch.
My former boss, and Voyage CEO, Oliver Cameron is a bit astounded that this event has passed with barely a ripple in the news cycle, as am I.
The lack of attention is, in some ways, a good thing.
Suburban Arizona residents havenât gotten upset, thereâs been relatively little news to make of the whole event, and so far none of the riders (who are under NDA) have found a reason to make a big deal over this.
One of questions Niedermeyer ponders is what threshold Waymo crossed that finally allowed for driverless vehicles, albeit in a tightly geofenced area.
âWaymoâs decision to put me in a fully driverless car on public roads anywhere speaks to the confidence it puts in its âdriver,â but the company wasnât able to point to one specific source of that confidenceâŚ.
âAutonomous driving is complex enough not to rely on a singular metric,â Panigrahi said.
Itâs a sensible, albeit frustrating, argument, given that the most significant open question hanging over the autonomous drive space is âhow safe is safe enough?ââ
Iâm not so sure I agree with Niedermeyer that the argument is âsensibleâ. Waymoâs response to the key question of what makes its vehicles safe enough to be driverless is, essentially, âtrust usâ.
And so far that works, at least for Waymo, which has done virtually everything right and caused no significant injuries, much less fatalities, in its ten years of existence.
Were Waymo to continue that trend indefinitely into the future, âtrust usâ, would continue to suffice.
Presumably, though, as Waymo ramps up miles and riders, collisions and injuries will happen. At that point, âtrust usâ probably wonât seem so sensible.
But all of that is in a hypothetical future. For now, I think itâs okay to celebrate and revel in what humanity is accomplishing.
We hear from a lot of Udacity students about their experiences in our programsâââthe good and the bad. Both positive and negative feedback are valuable, and itâs always nice to hear when weâve done a good job.
I will present Teaching Autonomous Driving at Massive Scale at 9am on Sunday, October 27. WEinADT (as it is called) is part of the larger IEEE Intelligent Systems Transportation Conference.
Professor Alexander Carballo has done terrific work organizing the workshop and I am lucky to be a part of the agenda!
This will be my first time visiting New Zealand, and I am super-excited to participate in WEinADT and ITSC. If youâre going to be at ITSC, please swing by my presentation at 9am on Sunday to say hello!
If you happen to be in New Zealand, even if you wonât be attending ITSC, send me (david.silver@udacity.com) an email! Iâd be delighted to meet some friendly faces in Auckland.
Reilly Brennan, a venture capitalist at Trucks.VC and one of the movers and shakers in the world of autonomous vehicles (seriously, look at that investment portfolio!), has a short post critiquing the naming regulations for advanced driver assistance systems.
âWeâre probably using [driver assistance systems] the wrong way and I believe a significant contributor to that problem is the branding and marketing of these systems.â
In particular, Reilly points out that USDA food labeling standards are much more stringent than labeling standards for driver assistance systems, which donât even really exist.
âBut if you want to brand your carâs systems as Auto-magic-pilot-drive-yourself, there is little today that the US Department of Transportation or Federal Trade Commission will do to prevent you.â
He doesnât quite prescribe a solution, but calls for âequal attentionâ between food labeling and vehicle systems, particularly because vehicle systems can kill other people on the road besides just the customer of the system.
Iâm genuinely uncertain how to handle this myself, and the post is worth a read and a ponder.
On a recent episode of MergeNow, Ed Niedermeyer interviewed Jon Mullen of RightHook, an autonomous vehicle simulation startup. I worked with Jon at Ford, so I was particularly interested.
Jon was on the show describing ScenarioScript, âan open format scenario-describing language.â Think of ScenarioScript as a format for describing traffic scenarios for autonomous vehicles, including variables like weather, road dimensions, and other relevant parameters.
Early in the show, Ed asked Jon if the release of ScenarioScript is an attempt to move everyone onto RightHookâs ecosystem. Jon said that was not the case, and itâs worth listening yourself to hear why and decide whether you believe that.
What struck me, though, was the question of whether and why it ever would be remunerative for a company to move the world onto its chosen open-source ecosystem.
The best example I can think of this is Bell Labs, where Unix, C, and C++ were invented, along with lots of other things. Bell Labs seems to me to be understudiedâââthe Wikipedia section on Nobel Prizes and Turing Awards is tremendous and must outstrip any other non-university in the world, certainly any for-profit entity.
But itâs less clear how much Bell (later AT&T, and now Nokia) benefited from these inventions. At the very least, the through-line from open-source creation to corporate profit requires some thinking.
Another, smaller, example is Willow Garage, the technology incubator that at one time maintained ROS, OpenCV, and PCL. All of those projects have been critical for self-driving car development, and robotics more generally. But Willow Garage dissolved as an entity in 2014.
The list could keep going. The success of Java was, at least, insufficient to prop up SUN. JavaScript didnât save Netscape, or its eventual acquirer, AOL.
Perhaps the most prominent counterexample is Android, which has made Google lots of money (I think) via Google Play commissions on apps.
Other companies are centered around developing hosting and services for a particular open-source project. MongoDB Inc. does this for MongoDB, Elastic does this for Elasticsearch, and Databricks does this for Apache Spark. All of these companies have been quite successful, but in the long run, Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers look like real threats.
Looking over this list, I actually think the invention of JavaScript at Netscape is the most instructive. JavaScript was transformational for the browser industry, and the Internet generally. But the open-source nature of the tool may have limited the value that Netscape specifically was able to capture.
A similar case might pertain to Unix, C, and C++ at Bell Labs.
These tools were a tremendous benefit to the entire industry, and perhaps helped Netscape and Bell at the expense of alternative (TV and postal mail, respectively?). However, the benefit accrued to the entire industry, not only to the company that invented to the technology.
To bring this full circle, if you go back and listen to Jon Mullenâs rationale for open-sourcing ScenarioScript, thatâs what he says đ
Dan Primack has been writing about the stumbles of VC-backed companies that have grown tremendously but struggle with unit economics. WeWork is the poster child of the moment, but per Primack:
âThere are dozens, if not hundreds, of other mature startups caught with their income statements down.â
While heâs not quite willing to come out and make a bold prediction, he hints that maybe, possibly, things might be tough for certain types of startups:
âFor companies with reasonable controls and paths to profitability, all systems remain goâŚ.But for unicorns that never looked beyond the trough, it could be slaughter season.â
Where I think this intersects with autonomous vehicles is that so many AV startups have raised huge amounts of money without a clear path to revenue, much less profitability.
This aligns with another trend, which is the increasingly common belief that the deployment of driverless (i.e. no safety operator) Level 4 vehicles is going to take a while.
âWe expect to see small-scale deployments of self-driving vehicles in the next five years, and then see the technology phase in over the next 30 to 50 years.â
Autonomous vehicles have tremendous capital requirements, which have thus far been financed either by automotive companies or VC firms. This has, in some cases, been spectacularly successful for early investors.
But if the funding well dries up, and weâre looking at 30 to 50 years until meaningful deployment, thereâs going to be a push for revenue in the near term.
Iâm interested to watch those revenue sources emerge.
Aurora founder and CEO Chris Urmson is one of the most experienced and most respected self-driving car engineers in the world. His team authored a safety report earlier this year: âThe New Era of Mobility.â
Safety culture, in particular, is a critical input to safe autonomous vehicles, and one that is easy to overlook. Auroraâs focus on this is reassuring.
I would love to see more detail around metrics. Urmson states,
âAt Aurora, weâve made a commitment: We wonât deploy our self-driving vehicles on public roads without human safety drivers until our technology is safer than a human driver. Which begs the question, what does safer than a human driver actually mean?â
A few sentences later, he seems to concede that Aurora hasnât yet zeroed in on a meaning: âwe continue to focus on identifying these metrics.â
Earlier in the post, Urmson reveals:
âWe resist the urge to put more and more cars on the road in an effort to ramp up on-road miles. Instead, we use on-road testing to validate our virtual tests.â
This seems in tension with the commitment to ensure super-human safety prior to deployment. In order to truly validate that Auroraâs technology is âsafer than a humanâ, it seems like that technology is eventually going to have to go on the road in a big way.
The search for coherent AV safety standards continues.
And it might take a while:
âWe expect to see small-scale deployments of self-driving vehicles in the next five years, and then see the technology phase in over the next 30 to 50 years.â
Sebastian Thrun, who is my boss at Udacity, is also the CEO of Kitty Hawk. Today, he announced Kitty Hawkâs third-generation eVTOL. The aircraft is called Heaviside, named after electrical engineering pioneer Oliver Heaviside.
The vehicle has rotors for vertical take off and landing (VTOL), and also wings that provide lift for short-range flying.
Most of the press articles seem to highlight how much quieter Heaviside is than a helicopter. To my mind, those, it just looks much more elegant.
Jalopnik has a fun video interview with Vijay Patnaik, a product lead at Waymo, working on their trucks. I had the opportunity to meet Vijay at SXSW this year and listen to a couple of his talks on Waymoâs trucking operation. Waymo is doing great work in that area.
Thereâs nothing earth-shattering in the 5 minute Jalopnik video that you wouldnât have heard from Waymo before, but Vijay does a nice job describing all of the sensors on the vehicle, and how they work together.
David Silver 