In November I gave a talk the Bay Area AI Meetup entitled, “How to Become a Self-Driving Car Engineer”. A fair bit of the talk was an overview of the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. But we also touched on a variety of other topics related to autonomous vehicles, particularly during the question and answer session.

The slides for the talk:

• Original Keynote file
• Converted PowerPoint file

The Lane-Finding demo:

• Jupyter notebook

The talk itself:

An interview I recorded after the talk with Alexy Khrabrov, the founder of Bay Area AI:

Thanks to the Bay Area AI team for having me!

Business Insider recently launched a special series called “Autonomous World” that covers self-driving cars. It’s thorough!

Articles (I have not read all of them yet) include:

• Uber has a plan to completely change your city
  But what if you live a town, village, township, or an unincorporated part of a borough, parish, or county?
• Self-driving cars are prone to hacks — and automakers are barely talking about it
  I haven’t read this article, but, having worked for Ford, I am skeptical of the headline.
• Uber is bringing its self-driving cars to San Francisco
  I’m super-excited to ride in one of these.
• Former Tesla and BMW exec says self-driving cars will start to kill car ownership in just 5 years
  I agree, but keep in mind that AOL (another former employer of mine) still generates about half a billion dollars a year in revenue from dial-up. “Starting to kill” something, and “actually killing it” are two different animals.
• These 20 companies are racing to build self-driving cars in the next 5 years
  Good overview. Explains the headline above.
• This is the tangled future of tech and transportation
  All roads lead to Didi.
• Here’s why self-driving cars can’t handle bridges
  It’s because bridges look different than anywhere else a car goes.
• How Google’s self-driving cars see the world
  Hint: through a lot of sensors.
• Uber’s self-driving cars are impressive — but there’s still a lot they can’t do
  Which is why they are looking to hire engineers from the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program!
• A top Silicon Valley investor predicts that 2 years from now everyone will be chauffered around in driverless cars on highways
  That is Chris Dixon, by the way.
• Lyft co-founder says human drivers could soon be illegal in America
  Anything’s possible, but color me skeptical
• 8 ways self-driving cars will drastically improve our lives
  I love these!
• The man who invented the first self-driving motorcycle is leading Uber into the future
  I’ve heard people compare Anthony Levandowski to Elon Musk.
• General Motors will test self-driving cars on public roads in Michigan
  Don’t count Michigan out.

Udacity’s partner, Auro Robotics, has been testing it’s self-driving shuttle on the campus of Santa Clara University for a year. In November they turned it loose on the public for the first time.

IEEE Spectrum says it’s getting a good reception!

During my rides, it was clear that the students are used to the Aero — so used to it that they don’t even think about getting out of its way. That can lead to a somewhat frustrating ride as the vehicle patiently trails a slow-walking student; it has a horn, but is too polite to beep. Visitors to campus, however, are at first puzzled, then thrilled, to learn that they are being chauffeured in a car that is driving itself. (See video, above.) And if you’re in the area, and have never had a ride in an autonomous vehicle, just stand in front of the parking garage for a while — the shuttle won’t ask to see your ID.

Ars Tecnica has a pretty cool story about Audi demonstrating Vehicle-to-Infrastucture (V2I) communnication in Las Vegas.

Or, really, Infrastructure-to-Vehicle:

Audi’s new Traffic Light Information feature can be found on 2017 A4s, Q7s, and allroad vehicles that have Audi’s Connect Prime package — which puts customers out $10 to $30 monthly, depending on the length of the subscription.

As an Audi driver, you experience this feature as a small icon that tells you how much time is left until the next green light as you come to a stop. If you come to a protected left turn and put your left blinker on, the car will give you a countdown unique to that light as well.

This is pretty basic V2I, but so far V2I has mostly been talk and no action, so it’s awesome to see Audi pushing this live.

It’s also interesting to me that Audi charges a fee for this. That suggests there aren’t really network effects to this effort, otherwise they’d want as many people on the system as possible, even if Audi had to subsidize it.

Last week my colleague Lisbeth organized a really fun event for Udacity Self-Driving Car Students.

We rented out an auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and had several amazing engineers talk about their work on autonomous vehicles.

The opening act was a tag-team of my colleagues Mac and Eric, talking about their work on Udacity’s own open-source self-driving car:

The main event was Sebastian Thrun interviewing Axel Gern, Head of Autonomous Driving at Mercedes-Benz North America:

And the encore was the ever-exciting George Hotz announcing Comma.ai’s new strategy:

Fun fact — at the beginning of George’s presentation, you’ll see him gesturing off-stage to some anonymous person to advance his slides. That was me. Working at a startup means wearing a lot of hats 😉

Logistics is one of the industries most ripe for autonomous vehicles. A lot of logistics involves traversing the same areas over and over again. And the vehicles are in use more or less constantly, as opposed to personal vehicles, which are parked 95% of the time.

In that vein, Nissan has just announced an autonomous towing system they’ve put into use at one of their plants in Japan.

And the video continues in the vein of autonomous vehicle videos with rather whimsical musical selections: