A lidar startup named Innovusion recently raised $30MM to deliver “image-quality” lidar. As optics.org points out, several different startups are racing to build laser-based autonomous vehicle sensors: Luminar, AEye, Quanergy, Oryx, Velodyne (the industry-standard), and surely a few others.

Credit to Innovusion, though: “image-quality lidar” really frames the issue in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Cost aside, is it really possible to replace cameras with lidar?

Watching the Innovusion demo video, the answer seems to be “closer, but not yet”. The quality of the lidar scan is terrific. However, “image quality” isn’t quite right. Signs appear in the video and are illegible, and at least to my eyes the traffic signal was not classifiable.

It’s exciting to see how much work is being done to push lidar resolution to a point that it is competitive with cameras.

It would also be exciting to see cameras develop their measurement abilities to compete with lidar and radar. Generally, cameras are terrific for detection and classification tasks, but they measure distances, heights, and other dimensions poorly.

And while many startups are jumping into the lidar space, comparatively fewer are working on perception with cameras. That work tends to be left to academic researchers, automotive manufacturers, and Tier 1 suppliers. Mobileye, the most prominent automotive computer vision specialty company (now part of Intel), has mostly been quiet about their computer vision work.

With so many companies pushing lidar resolution to camera-like levels, there might be an opening for some computer vision startups to push camera measurements to lidar-like levels.

The Washington Post reports that Ford Motor Company and Argo AI have announced they will begin testing self-driving cars in Washington, DC, next year.

This is exciting to me as a Ford alumnus, and because I grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, so I know the city well.

Beyond my personal connections, this just seems like another step in the increasingly rapid expansion of self-driving vehicles to more and more cities.

Lyft and Aptiv are testing with the general public Las Vegas right now, as is Drive.AI in the Dallas suburbs.

Uber has tested in Pittsburgh in the past, and probably will test again in the future, as has nuTonomy in Boston.

Waymo says they will open their Phoenix-area fleet to the general public this year. Cruise will open their fleet to the public in San Francisco next year. Now Ford says they will open to the public in Washington, DC.

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are the four largest cities in America. Presumably self-driving cars will get there in the next few years, too.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shut down a self-driving school bus pilot program in Florida. The pilot was run by the French firm Transdev, and involved a small shuttle that travels at a glacial 8mph. To put that in context, the average Boston marathoner runs faster than this shuttle.

There’s a little bit of back and forth jawing between NHTSA, which says, “Using a non-compliant test vehicle to transport children is irresponsible, inappropriate, and in direct violation of the terms of Transdev’s approved test project.”

Transdev, for its part, Transdev “believed the pilot met the requirements of the testing and demonstration project approved by NHTSA for adults and children to ride on the same route.”

Realistically, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting hurt at 8mph. I mean, it’s possible, but the speed is so slow.

On the other hand, painting a self-driving shuttle yellow and calling it a school bus is basically inviting a public outcry, at least at this point in the development of autonomous vehicles. If the purpose of the trial was to demonstrate that adults and children can ride in a vehicle together, it seems like there are several intermediate steps to hit before calling anything a school bus.

There’s also relatively little to gain by automating school buses. Buses are remarkably safe. And since the cost of the driver is amortized over all of the passengers, the financial benefits of automation are low.

Last month I had the privilege of traveling to Kiev, Ukraine, to speak at Navimotive 2018, hosted by the Ukranian automotive software supplier Intellias.

It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed witnessing the work taking place on self-driving cars in Eastern Europe and beyond. Ukraine is a great country.

My talk at the conference was entitled, “Carla: The Udacity Self-Driving Car”.

On Tuesday morning I will speak on a panel at the Autonomous Vehicle Insurance Forum, hosted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The panel has a terrific lineup and I am delighted to participate, and to learn about the intersection of insurance and self-driving cars.

Please join me at the Santa Clara Convention Center!

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 🚗