Baidu’s Apollo self-driving car program has received permission to operate fully driverlessly in Wuhan and Chongqing.
For a long time Apollo has been operating driverless robotaxis in Beijing, but with a “chaperone” in the front seat. This next phase will see riders travel in the cars completely unaccompanied.
Kodiak just announced its longest delivery run to-date: 5,600 miles from Texas to California to Florida and back to Texas. The route was part of the kick-off of a partnership with 10 Roads, a freight carrier for high-priority USPS parcels.
One of Kodiak’s advantages is a lightweight process for building highway maps, that allows Kodiak to map highways for autonomous driving after a single human-driven run. That scalability enabled us to quickly prepare the entire round-trip, coast-to-coast route.
Kodiak CEO Don Burnette shared with TechCrunchthat “the autonomous system was engaged over 90% of the time.”
One my current projects at Kodiak is helping to bring that engagement rate even higher, especially with respect to construction zones. If that sounds exciting, you should join us!
I enjoyed joining Ryan Dsouza’s Conversations podcast to discuss self-driving cars, deep learning, and the work we’re doing at Cruise to launch autonomous vehicles to the public!
Cruise is opening fully driverless vehicles to the public in San Francisco, California! I took my own first driverless ride this week and it was amazing!
Join the Cruise Rider Community on our homepage. You can even sign up if you live outside of San Francisco (it just might take a little longer for us to get to you).
On Monday evening, I met my manager, Jason, in San Francisco, to take my first-ever driverless ride. We hailed Torta, one of Cruise’s fully driverless vehicles, to take us from Bob’s Donuts to Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park, and back. With nobody behind the wheel!
Last week got a little crazy for me, so I missed the opportunity to post here about my Forbes.com article and interview with Auterion, a Swiss-American drone manufacturer.
In the past year, drone software start-up Auterion has grown its customer-base of drone manufacturers from five partners to one hundred, according to founder and CEO Lorenz Meier. The four year-old Swiss-American startup has produced drone software from the beginning, but Lorenz ties the recent inflection point to its Skynode reference hardware.
Lorenz Meier, the CEO has a lot of good quotes. Check it out.
According to Draganfly co-founder and CEO Cameron Chell, the initial $9 million order calls for an initial delivery of 10,000 drones starting in 2022, with 50,000 units over the life of the initial agreement. That will make this model, codenamed Project Breezemo, the most common Draganfly product in existence.
Kind of wild that the biggest drone order (in history, maybe?) is for a companion. Read the whole thing.