[msb-alumni] LONG: In Houston's suburbs, autonomous vehicles map the future of delivery
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 16:38:04 -0500
BlankIn Houston's suburbs, autonomous vehicles map the future of delivery .
Peter
Holley.
HOUSTON -- On the muggy streets of suburban Houston, amid McMansions, bright
green
lawns and stately oak trees, a futuristic race is quietly afoot. The
contestants are
not people but late-model Toyota Priuses outfitted with an array of
sophisticated
sensors.
Despite fierce competition and unending pressure to perform, the nearly silent
electric vehicles do not speed. They move cautiously, rigorously following
traffic
laws and never topping 25 mph.
Their goal is not an easily discerned finish line but to map large swaths of
the
nation's fourth-largest metropolis, a sprawling patchwork of neighborhoods,
mini-cities, strip malls, gridlocked superhighways and mazelike gated
communities "
an area so prodigious in size it easily could swallow Manhattan, Brooklyn,
Queens and
Staten Island whole.
The vehicles are owned by Nuro, a Silicon Valley robotics company with an
ambitious
goal -- to become the world's preeminent autonomous delivery service, allowing
millions of people to have groceries and other goods delivered by robots
instead of
making trips to the store, potentially reducing traffic and kicking off a new
chapter
in our relationship with machines.
For months now, Nuro's robotically piloted vehicles have been successfully, if
quietly, delivering groceries to restaurants and homes around Houston, the
vehicles'
sensors mapping the city as they go.
The faster Nuro's vehicles map Houston's notoriously chaotic roadways, the
faster the
company can refine its software and export its business model elsewhere.
But time is in short supply. Like Nuro, companies such as Amazon,
Alphabet-owned
Waymo, Robomart, General Motors' Cruise division, Ford-affiliated Argo AI,
Starship
Technologies and many others are also rushing to deploy high-functioning
autonomous
vehicles for delivery and passenger transport, with some companies attracting
major
deals and billions in funding.
Their goal is to earn public trust and offer real-life convenience, experts
say,
heightening their chances of securing a valuable foothold in a new era defined
by
autonomous transportation.
To get there, they will first have to run their autonomous vehicles, or AVs,
through
millions of miles of driving tests in cities such as Houston until they are
glitch-free and unquestionably safe.
"The pressure is real," said David Syverud, head of robot operations at Nuro.
"And to
be clear, it is a race in the AV space to deploy quickly and be the first to
really
get there."
As with any race, more speed engenders greater risk, particularly in Houston, a
car-dependent city dominated by construction, impatient drivers and the kind of
busy
roadways that present a serious challenge to experienced human drivers, much
less
robotic ones. Each year, more than 600 people die on Houston-area roads, making
the
city one of the nation's deadliest major metro areas for drivers, according to
a
comprehensive analysis of regional traffic fatalities, using 16 years of
federal
data, that was recently published by the Houston Chronicle.
Regardless of the risks, AV enthusiasts such as Syverud are confident that
there will
come a day in the not-so-distant future when " almost no matter where your
family
resides " your groceries will be delivered to your home via an autonomous robot.
But to make that vision a reality, companies such as Nuro have to build it from
scratch, a herculean effort involving dozens of vehicle operators and hundreds
of
engineers working in synchronicity each day to test robotic systems and map
entire
cities.
After completing a successful pilot in the Phoenix area, Nuro, which has raised
more
than $1 billion in funding, arrived in Houston last year and launched
autonomous
deliveries for Kroger, the nation's largest operator of traditional
supermarkets, in
April and began working with Domino's Pizza in June.
The city's reliance on cars has done little to burnish its national reputation,
but
it was a boon for Nuro. With an average commute of about 60 minutes round-trip,
hungry Houstonians are eager to avoid driving any more than they have to, Nuro
officials say.
Company officials say they were also drawn to Houston for the complexity of its
metropolitan environment, a puzzle of independent communities, each with its
own road
conditions, zoning ordinances, parking rules and traffic laws. Some area
neighborhoods offer wide lanes and little traffic; others are narrow and
perpetually
hectic -- providing the company's robotic software a massive variety of testing
conditions.
As the country's most ethnically diverse large city -- and with a foreign-born
population of 1.4 million -- Houston also is a place where Nuro officials could
probe
fundamental questions about its business model.
"The big question for us is: Who is going to use this service, and how often
will
they do it" said Sola Lawal, a Nuro product operations manager based in Houston
who
formerly worked for Uber. "Our robots don't care who they're delivering to, but
we
want to understand how different demographics interact with and feel about the
robots."
Houston allows for this broad swath of experience in one city.
Delivering items locally to a customer's door -- particularly food that has to
stay
hot or cold -- has long been one of the most expensive logistical problems in
transportation, in part because of the labor costs. It is far cheaper to
transport
hundreds of packages in the back of a UPS truck with multiple drop-offs at
addresses
along a set route.
That has helped hinder the online spread of grocery delivery, which can be
cost-prohibitive when factoring in a driver's wages.
Nuro appears to have found a way around that complication. Using the maps
created by
its current vehicles, Nuro plans to launch in the coming months a new version
of its
fully autonomous, passenger-less vehicle known as the R2.
The company claims that a smaller delivery vehicle, such as the cooler-size
delivery
robots employed by Amazon or Starship Technologies, would be unable to travel
at the
speeds and distances necessary to make autonomous grocery delivery efficient in
Houston.
A larger vehicle without a human driver offers other benefits, as well,
according to
Nuro -- more space for groceries, better maneuverability and braking, and no
need for
interior safety features to accommodate people.
Regardless of what robot does the job, for Yael Cosset, the chief digital
officer for
Kroger, a partner to Nuro's test in Houston, there is little choice but to
embrace
autonomous delivery.
"A few years ago, we were telling customers that if they place an order today,
we can
have it ready for them tomorrow afternoon, and that was okay with them," Cosset
said.
"Today, some of our customers will expect that same order to be available
within the
hour."
"Now, if you need a roasted chicken and pizza and a bottle of milk in the next
45
minutes, I can fulfill that demand for the customer because of Nuro, which is a
critical component of our delivery modalities," he added.
When a robotically driven vehicle pulls up to a home with groceries, two Nuro
employees -- known as vehicle operators -- are always inside. (That will change
when
Nuro launches its fully autonomous R2 vehicle in Houston later this year.)
Each day in Houston, all 65 of Nuro's vehicle operators, working in teams that
consist of a driver and a co-driver, are tasked with preparing Nuro's fleet for
the
road. Already, the company says, drivers are making dozens of deliveries a day,
many
of them, somewhat surprisingly, to businesses in Houston's bustling restaurant
scene.
Like driving instructors overseeing an artificially intelligent teenager behind
the
wheel, operators -- who remain ready to wrest control of the car from the robot
if
something goes wrong -- monitor and document turns, braking and acceleration as
the
vehicles, outfitted with dozens of navigational sensors, quietly roll from one
street
to the next, creating a hyper-detailed map of the city.
Though their job may sound uneventful, vehicle operators say they must remain
in a
state of near-constant focus for hours at a time " punctuated by brief moments
of
extreme intensity. As the vehicle moves, the co-driver, who has a laptop that
monitors the robotic system, verbally informs the driver of the robot's
intentions
before they occur -- a cue known as a "call-out."
The driver's job is to listen to the call-outs and ensure the vehicle is
behaving
appropriately while monitoring the driving conditions outside the car. There is
no
eating in the car, and drinks must be sealed. To keep things fresh, drivers
and
co-drivers switch places every few hours and take periodic breaks.
Narrow streets, potholes, construction and low-hanging tree branches are
obstacles
that offer the team a chance to improve the vehicles' neural network, in hopes
of
bringing full autonomy to life. But the biggest obstacle is a human one -- an
aggressive driver in another vehicle, frustrated by the robot's slow-moving,
law-abiding style.
"What keeps me up at night is a member of my team being injured by a human
driver who
is drunk or distracted," Syverud said.
Many of the company's vehicle operators, such as Troy Veuleman, have no
background in
tech and found their roles through online job postings. Working as an emergency
medical technician in Shreveport, La., for four years, Veuleman grew accustomed
to
long, stress-filled hours behind the wheel of an ambulance, often with little
downtime between shifts. Whether he was racing through rush-hour traffic with a
patient in critical condition aboard or keeping a gunshot victim calm when the
person's life depended on it, Veuleman said he honed the art of remaining
clearheaded
and decisive amid a daily stream of heart-pounding drama. When he decided to
switch
careers last year, those same skills " as well as an exceptionally clean
driving
record " made the 25-year-old an attractive candidate for sitting behind the
wheel of
a robotically driven car and remaining alert for hours on end.
To prepare vehicle operators to endure the tedium of the roadway, Syverud said
he
reminds his employees that they are part of a larger mission, using a message
that
Chris Urmson -- one of the architects of Google's self-driving-car program --
used to
tell his staff: About 40,000 people die on the roads every year, which is
roughly the
equivalent of four Boeing 737 Maxes falling out of the sky every week. Nuro's
staffers, Syverud said, have an opportunity to lower those numbers by keeping
people
off the roads.
For employees like Veuleman, that urgent message resonates like a call to duty.
During long days inside the car, when it is tempting to take one's eyes off the
road,
the former EMT tells himself that though he is no longer saving lives in the
present,
he may be saving them in the future.
"I come from a world where you're literally helping people and saving lives
each
day," Veuleman said. "This role is different. But there is definitely a mission
in
place, and we believe that making the roads safer can actually change the
world."
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