The Chinese search giant Baidu has taken another step towards supporting the development of self-driving vehicles. The tech giant has announced a new autonomous vehicle platform called Project Apollo to help car companies accelerate their self-driving car developments. With the platform, Baidu will be offering the partners both tech and open source code needed to operate autonomous vehicles.

Baidu plans to open up Project Apollo for testing in closed environments in July and then offer it for vehicles operating in urban conditions later this year. Baidu set an optimistic goal for itself to deliver self-driving vehicles to the market by the year 2018. The company got permissions to test the vehicles in California last year and also partnered with Nvidia to work together towards the common goal.

Baidu initially started working on driverless cars with German car manufacturer BMW which has been working on the technology for well over a decade. However, the partnership was called off last year reportedly due to different pace of both the companies. The new project, Project Apollo will also help Baidu find new partners to work with, including car manufacturers from its home country.

Last year, BMW, in association with Intel and Mobileye announced a platform to create common technology standards and bring together multiple brands working in the same direction. According to Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich, the platform would play a critical role in advancing the safety aspects of driverless cars.

A survey last year indicated that Chinese were more open to the idea of using a car with autonomous functions compared to Germans and Americans. And while Baidu has got the tech and data to build for its home market, it won’t be easy to beat Waymo (Google) in other parts of the world because of its deep map data and years of head start.

Source: MarketWired

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Lidar is a key component in the race for autonomous vehicles. That is exactly what the Waymo-Uber lawsuit is pivoted around. And now, a startup claims to have improved upon what is at the centre of this upcoming revolution. Luminar Technologies is the startup in question. It was working under the wraps for almost five years and raised USD 36 million in seed funding from names like Canvas Ventures, GVA Capital and 1517 Fund.

Austin Russell, now 22, co-founded the company to make roads a safer place, at an age when he wasn’t even of legal driving age in many parts of the world. The product is a powerful form of Lidar which, as the startup claims, provides 50 times more resolution and 10 times the range, thus providing more data for the self-driving computers to use.

The initial support for the startup came from Peter Theil in the form of Theil fellowship. Apart from Waymo, which appears to have made significant progress with its driverless vehicles, Luminar also faces competition from Velodyne and Quanergy, companies providing similar solutions for driverless cars. Luminar however claims that because its system can see objects at 200 metres thus giving the system more time to respond even at high speeds.

Some experts however believe that Lumnar is looking at the wrong problem. According to them, increasing the resolution to such a level won’t solve real problems, cutting on the costs will. Right now Luminar plans to manufacture 10,000 lidar units and about 100 of the systems will be tested by four undisclosed companies, both tech and auto, working on self-driving vehicles.

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NuTonomy, the autonomous car startup spun out of MIT will soon begin testing its autonomous vehicles in Boston. The company beat Uber to public streets in the race for autonomous cars by rolling out driverless taxis in Singapore. It announced that it has signed an agreement with officials in Boston to roll out driverless cars to the city streets and the testing will begin in an industrial park in South Boston later this year.

Similar to Singapore, their autonomous Renault Zoe electric cars will be operated in public area but somewhat removed from the whole urban chaos an average driver deals with. Initially only company engineers will be riding the cars in Boston however, there could be plans to open it up for public like the Singapore program.

“These tests in the city of Boston will enable our engineers to adapt our autonomous vehicle software to the weather and traffic challenges of this unique driving environment,” company CEO and co-founder Karl Iagnemma said in a statement. “Testing our self-driving cars so near to nuTonomy’s home is the next step towards our ultimate goal: deployment of a safe, efficient, fully autonomous mobility-on-demand transportation service.”

According to company statement, there are plans to have a dozen cars on the roads in Singapore as this year approaches a close. In Singapore, the cars are picking and dropping passengers through a partnership with Grab. nuTonomy will have to put together a similar partnership in Boston which is highly unlikely considering the fact that it would cause conflict of interest as both Uber and Lyft are working on their own versions of self-driving cars. Uber is already running tests in Pittsburgh which kicked off a short while after nuTonomy launched the program in Singapore.

The race for autonomous vehicles is getting competitive as almost all the players in the space are registering good progress. Alphabet (Google) seems to be much further ahead of the others but it is still a long way to go before any one of these players could actually start affecting the ground transportation.

Source: WSJ

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With the plans to rebuild ground transportation from scratch, the race for autonomous vehicles is on. Tech brands are working overtime to make sure they are a stakeholder in this space while automobile companies are supporting the innovations to avoid being the Kodak of auto industry. Baidu has previously announced that it is working on its own version of autonomous vehicles and also recently introduced a platform in association with Nvidia to support the developments.

Baidu CFO Jennifer Li at a recent Bloomberg conference reiterated the company’s plans to bring driverless cars and shared that the company will have driverless vehicles by 2018 with mass production possible by 2020. This closely matches the timelines Elon Musk has shared for Tesla.

Li stressed on Baidu’s capabilities and investments in artificial intelligence which would allow for rapid progress in this space. China is a huge car market and some recent surveys indicate that the Chinese people are more open to the idea of these vehicles.

While the promises are bold and the company optimistic, it is going to be a steep climb, even for a brand like Baidu. They recently got permission to test their vehicles in California however Baidu barely exists outside of its home country. Autonomous vehicles will heavily rely on mapping data and Baidu hasn’t got anything outside its home turf. That is where Google has generated heaps of data and has invested billions in the self-driving car project.

Regulations will also define how the technology is introduced and adopted by the masses. The Chinese regulators have shown some positive signs to the developments until now but in most cases, they have been slow to adopt new technologies in other industries.

We are anxious to see if Baidu delivers on the promise of a new face of transportation in 2018.

Source: Bloomberg

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With all the buzz about an autonomous future, Uber and Tesla have been placed on the poster for innovation in automobile and ground transportation by the entire tech community. Uber has been getting all the attention with its driverless experiment in Pittsburgh but its home rival Lyft wants the world to know that you shouldn’t just ignore its potential.

In a Medium post published recently by Lyft co-founder John Zimmer shared his predictions for the future of ground transportation. With this post, he highlights the obvious problem with private car ownership. The cars just aren’t used enough to justify building our cities around them. With ridesharing gaining momentum and vehicle ownership on the decline, the future cities will be built around people and not cars.

He highlights three key shifts; a widespread autonomous fleet accounting for majority of Lyft rides within five years, car ownership will fade significantly by 2025 and cities’ physical environment will change as a result.

These of course are his predictions and observations, not really an outline of the plans Lyft has drafted. However, pretty much what he has shared makes sense. The change has already started and the interest of major automobile companies in sharing economy is a clear sign that they are anticipating and accepting the change. Ford recently invested in Zoomcar, Volvo launched cars that can use phones as keys for easy sharing, PSA group invested in another car sharing startups and these are just some of the examples.

“Ridesharing has already begun to empower many people to live without owning a car. The age of young people with driver’s licenses has been steadily decreasing ever since right around when I was born. In 1983, 92% of 20 to 24-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2014 it was just 77%. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had licenses. Today it’s just 24%. All told, a millennial today is 30% less likely to buy a car than someone from the previous generation.”

Zimmer also highlights how ridesharing is the first phase of the movement to end car ownership and with autonomy entering the picture, transportation will turn into a subscription service which will be more flexible than owning. Heavy users will pick subscriptions like Netflix while occasional users will opt for pay as you go sort of plans.

As consumers won’t keep holding onto their private vehicles when there is a shift to transportation as a service model, this would allow for an easier shift towards cleaner vehicles. There are lot of details to be worked out before this becomes a reality but the change is certainly heading towards us.

That said, Zimmer hasn’t really shared much on how Lyft plans to achieve that apart from the fact that they are working towards the same with General Motors and also used the opportunity to tag public demonstrations of self-driving technology by his competitors as marketing stunts. Zimmer has painted a pretty picture of the future of transportation but there are more questions to be answered about the future of Lyft too.

You can find the Medium post here.

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By now, YouTube is flooded with people sharing their experiences of being driven around by their Tesla cars. Until now, if you wanted to get this experience, your best bet was to buy a Tesla. However, Comma.ai, with technology built in a garage promised a low cost solution and at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this year, founder George Hotz unveiled the first official product called Comma One.

While the device won’t make the vehicle completely autonomous, Hotz shares that it will make it semi-autonomous, good for highway use, like Tesla. The device makes use of certain sensors like front radars that are already present in many cars so it won’t work with all cars at launch. However, Hotz hopes to expand the list of supported vehicles over time. The hardware will replace the rear view mirror in cars and will use the camera to identify what is around the vehicle.

He also used the opportunity to take a dig at many other companies working towards bringing autonomous vehicles to masses. According to him, many of them don’t even have a hardware, let alone a product that they can ship. While the product is squarely targeted at Tesla Autopilot, Hotz also appreciated how Tesla is constantly working to improve the system and that the widely talked about crash was an unfortunate incident that was a case of driver not paying attention like most accidents on the road.

Comma One will cost $999 to buy however there will be a monthly cost of $24 for the service. The device is likely to ship in limited quantities before the end of this year.

Source: TechCrunch

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Uber will be testing its self-driving cabs in real world starting this month in Pittsburgh by assigning the semi-autonomous vehicles to Uber users randomly. The fleet will consist of modified Volvo XC90 SUVs. Each car will be supervised by a human in the driver’s seat ready to take control when required and a co-drive taking notes. Uber hasn’t revealed how many of these cars will be running around.

Volvo Cars and Uber join forces to develop autonomous driving cars

Uber is joining forces with the right teams to maximise the outcome of its efforts towards a driverless future. The company announced yesterday that it will be working with Volvo to develop autonomous vehicles. The two companies will be investing a combined of USD 300 million towards this project. The primary objective of the push towards a driverless future is to make roads safer. Volvo has always been known to make some of the safest vehicles on the road today with the help of various active and passive safety features. The base vehicles will be manufactured by Volvo Cars and then purchased for use by Uber. Uber will add its own self-developed autonomous driving systems to the vehicle and Volvo will use the same base vehicle for its own autonomous car strategy. It is a win-win situation for both the companies. Uber will need decades to come anywhere close to what Volvo is capable of right now when it comes to making cars. On the other side, Uber is very strong when it comes to technology and has the right kind of talent to help Volvo eliminate the role of driver. Uber also has the intelligence that comes from its fleet doing combined 1.2 billion miles per month.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said: “Over one million people die in car accidents every year. These are tragedies that self-driving technology can help solve, but we can’t do this alone. That’s why our partnership with a great manufacturer like Volvo is so important. Volvo is a leader in vehicle development and best-in-class when it comes to safety. By combining the capabilities of Uber and Volvo we will get to the future faster, together.”

Along with this, Uber also announced the acquisition of Otto, a startup that has been working on technologies to make trucks autonomous. With this acquisition, Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Otto will lead their combined self-driving efforts across personal transport, delivery and long distance trucking in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Pittsburgh.

Lyft has also been quick to make moves in this space with GM. While everyone is talking about the possibilities for brands like Uber with autonomous vehicles, they could also pose a threat to the entire business of Uber. He even highlighted this in a recent interview with Business Insider. Autonomy will increase vehicle productivity and it won’t be long before we see many new businesses being built around it. Right now Uber has got its fleet of drivers and the advanced systems that work behind the scenes to get you a ride but if any brand is able to achieve affordable automation before Uber, Uber will have a major threat to deal with.

Kalanick highlighted the same in his interview and quoted, “If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the enemy that’s in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher quality than Uber’s, then Uber is no longer a thing.”

Is the aggressive push by Uber towards a driverless future justified? We think so. From how things appear right now, it is a situation where the winner takes all and nobody has the timelines. The future of ground transportation is certainly very interesting.

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The automobile industry has largely been driven by the legacy players and it was hard to imagine the words “automobile” and “startup” used together until a while back. Now however, things are changing as new trends emerge and automobile industry shifts towards mobility industry. Many tech startups are driving the new trends that we see including autonomy in cars. If you are interested in a driverless future, here are some startups you should keep a track on.

(Image: Nissan by cwkarl/CC BY-ND 2.0)

1- NuTonomy

NuTonomy was founded by MIT PhD graduates Karl Lagnemma and Emilio Frazzoli in 2013. While some startups and corporations are focusing on building technologies for future cars, they are working on retrofitting existing vehicles to make them driverless. The company is testing a fleet of self driving taxis which they expect to deploy in Singapore by 2018. NuTonomy cars are also being tested in other parts of the world with JLR.

Website

2- Nauto

Palo Alto based Nauto was founded by Stefan Heck and Fredrick Soo in 2015. Instead of relying on LiDar sensors being currently used by the likes of Google and others, Nauto uses pro-sumer cameras along with already existing tech like motion sensors, GPS and few other sensors. Merging dashcam info with AI, the system detects what is happening in front and helps the driver avoid dangerous situations. This isn’t exactly driverless at this point but by increasing the level of autonomy, it will accelerate the shift.

Website

3- Drive.ai

Silicon valley startup that has been working quietly under the wraps for quite a while got permissions to test on public roads in California earlier this year. Founded by Sameep Tandon and Carol Reiley, the startup is working on applying deep learning techniques to driverless cars. The company claims that the system will be better for extreme conditions when driving situations are far from ideal.

Website

4- Cruise automation

This Silicon Valley startup was in news recently for being acquired by General Motors. The startup launched in 2013 with semi-automatic conversion systems for vehicles and has developed algorithms that allow the vehicle to be more aware of road and surroundings. The startup has full fledged driverless systems and the association with GM will allow it to reach the goals quickly.

Website

5- Oxbotica

Oxbotica is a spin out company from the University of Oxford. The system developed by them, called Selenium can pull data from various systems and then use a series of algorithms to determine the position, surrounding conditions and possible route. The software learns as the vehicle is driven around and then can offer autonomy. They plan to develop software for not just autonomous cars but warehouse robots, forklifts and public transport vehicles.

Website

6- Comma ai

George Hotz took up the job of bringing self driving technology to masses at very low prices and started Comma.ai. Hotz termed Mobileye “behind the times” as he believed the same can be achieved at lower costs and promised aftermarket self driving kits for less than USD 1000. The company recently released data of its car driving on public roads and to keep development costs down, they are inviting people to share their driving data through a dashcam app.

Website

7- Otto

Launched by a group of former senior Google employees, including one from Google’s autonomous car project, Otto aims to make trucks driverless. This will make trucks more efficient as they can be used for longer part of their life and just like the promise driverless cars bring, driverless trucks will make roads safer.

Website

Also read: 9 industries that will be affected by the arrival of driverless cars

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Comma.ai has been in news every now and then because of the promises it gave us for the future of driverless cars. Founder George Hotz started the company in a bid to prove a point, that existing vehicles and off the shelf components can be used to make driverless vehicles at low cost. Now Comma.ai has made 7.25 hours of driverless highway driving data available openly. This is a particularly interesting move considering the fact that while Google and Tesla have been pretty open about their developments, most of the startups in this space weren’t.

Sharing data with other innovators in this space will help the entire industry collectively move forward. Being open helps in improving machine learning. George Hotz has invited people to use the data to replicate the results and build further with the data. He shared that there were missteps along the way and no one needs to repeat them to learn the same lessons. He has also asked Zoox, Tesla, Google and Cruise to share their data.

Most of the companies working towards autonomous vehicles are looking at urban conditions first, with the exception of Tesla maybe, however the data shared by Comma.ai is for highway driving conditions. It could also be of help to the hobbyists that are working on these technologies as their backyard projects. This would also open up the gates to the company for right kind of people and attract them with the message. You can contribute towards a driverless world by using their chffr app that turns your mobile phone into a cloud based dashboard camera and feeds data to comma.ai to help develop their system.

Source: TechCrunch

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FiveAI, a Britain based startup that raised $2.7 million in equity funding to help develop an artificial intelligence to drive a car seamlessly.

Source: Steve Jurvetson / CC BY 2.0

Amadeus Capital, a venture capital company leading the investment thinks that the startup is worth more than it’s cashing on given that it has successfully exited a number of tech startups. The whole concept revolves around studying the nearby premises with the help of sensors which is all being processed by central computer capable of ‘machine learning’. This way it picks up information from encounters and applies to future situation.

“It uses sensors to perceive what’s out there – identifying things like road, pavement, street signs, pedestrians and other cars,” says Steve Allpress, chief technology officer at FiveAI. “It builds up a probabilistic picture of what is likely to happen that can see how our own actions and [others’] actions will influence possible options in order to then plan the safest route.”

The system is in tough competition with Tesla’s autonomous features which is just a driving aid than a fully autonomous driving system. This system unlike Tesla’s doesn’t require human to be in charge. Google’s system doesn’t have to have human interactions as a necessity but requires very heavy data to get things done. As the data is limited to only fewer area that Google has mapped, the technology would be repetitively used in such perimeter only.

“There are good perception systems out there that can identify objects,” says Allpress. “What’s more challenging is the actual AI. You want a system that can work out behaviour before it happens. You don’t want a system that will be surprised that someone’s going to walk out and then react. You want to know someone is going to walk out before and plan accordingly.”

The system needs initial work and a long process of validation and testing of the model but the company sees this as an integral part of autonomous tech. this would eventually lead to consolidation of fleets and manufacturer and car ownership will become unnecessary. This is because, once the driver is removed the cost reduction would set in and  it will become the most affordable option for most current drivers.

FiveAI would operate as standalone business in the meantime. The company plans to work with transportation operators, manufacturers, and rental car firms.

Source: Forbes

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