The CARLA team just launched an autonomous driving challenge in connection with NeurIPS 2021 in December.

“The main goal of the challenge remains the assessment of the driving proficiency of autonomous agents in realistic traffic situation.”

CARLA is a widely-used open-source simulation engine, and the goal is to use machine learning to drive a car through different routes in the simulator.

This is the third iteration of the challenge. More than 45 teams competed in the most recent challenge. You can see the winning talk here:

Originally published at http://davidsilver.blog on September 19, 2021.

Embark today announced a partnership with Ryder, to use Ryder terminals as part of its freight network. Ryder has also formed partnerships with Waymo and TuSimple.

That got me wondering — who owns the end customer in the trucking business?

In robotaxis, that would be Uber and Lyft, at least right now. That’s why Argo is partnering with Lyft to go to market in different cities. I have some reservations about that strategy, but at least it’s clear who bring what value to the table in that partnership.

In trucking, I actually don’t know the ecosystem well enough to pinpoint who does what. Ryder seems to be a terminal operator. But I need to read up more on who the “end customers” are, and what companies own those end customers.

Originally published at http://davidsilver.blog on September 18, 2021.

Cruise has been in the press a lot in the past few days!

Cruise Looks To The Skies As It Readies Robotaxi Service by Alan Ohnsman, in Forbes

Particularly on the operations side, Cruise has recently hired several hire profile veterans of the airline industry. Senior Vice President Gil West explains why:

“There’s safety. The aviation model is important here with an approach and processes that were developed over the last 100 years. That overlaps with exactly what we’re doing in the autonomous space. …

I’ve long been curious about what life is like as a publicly-traded lidar startup, all of which are doing exciting stuff but none of which yet has meaningful revenue. Innoviz was happy to talk with me about that, their partnership on the BMW iNext series, and their plans for the future.

All on Forbes.com.

Lidar startups like Innoviz find themselves in a curious position as publicly-traded companies with little in the way of revenue or other objective metrics, because virtually no production vehicles currently incorporate lidar.

Innoviz Vice President of North America Aditya Srinivasan shares that, for the moment, startups like his differentiate themselves in terms of design wins.

Those design wins have proven scarce. So far, only two have been announced publicly — Innoviz’s partnership with BMW, and competitor Luminar’s inclusion in future Volvo vehicles.

This week is IAA, the world’s premier automotive show, in Frankfurt, Germany.

Four years ago I had the pleasure of speaking at IAA 2017, as part of Udacity’s partnership with Mercedes-Benz on the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. That was such a fun trip!

We hosted events with students, met our colleagues in Udacity Germany, and saw exciting new car concepts.

• Alphabet halts sales of Laser Bear Honeycomb lidar sensors. The head of the division just left Waymo for Aeva, and I would guess this is a prelude to winding down the lidar effort. There are enough lidar start-up in the ecosystem now that it seems unlikely even Waymo could outperform all of them as a side project.
• Nuro builds a test track at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Back when I was at Udacity, we did driver safety training at Sonoma Raceway. Those track has a lot of space and are only fully utilized a few days a year. Makes sense that a permanent tenant could be valuable.
• Autonomous vehicle TikTok stars.

Originally published at http://davidsilver.blog on September 6, 2021.

A cascade of automotive news sites report that NIO has started requiring drivers to pass a quiz in order to use its advanced driver assistance system, called NIO Pilot. Apparently this comes in the wake of a fatal crash involving the system.

Back when I was teaching at Udacity, we used quizzes all the time. In fact, the courses we built were required to have a certain cadence of quizzes. Quizzes are great, because they force students out of passive listening and into active thinking.

Of course, there are quizzes and better quizzes — not all of them are created…

Gatik just raised a big $85 million Series B funding round. While this is much smaller than other companies are raising through SPACs, IPOs, or jumbo private investments, it’s a real accomplishment.

Life has gotten pretty tough out there for small autonomous vehicle companies. Investors are skittish about backing smaller startups that will have to compete against multi-billion dollar entities.

Gatik has evidently put together a convincing story that their autonomous box trucks, focused on transportation between distribution centers, are sufficiently different from the rest of the autonomous trucking industry.

The company is currently 70 employees and plans to double in size, making it one of the few remaining autonomous vehicle startups of that size. And they have truek driverless trucks operating (albeit on only one route so far)!

Published

Originally published at http://davidsilver.blog on September 1, 2021.