BlankUber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
The autonomous cars, launching this summer, are custom Volvo XC90s, supervised
by humans in the driver’s seat.
August 18, 2016
Max Chafkin chafkin
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Source: Uber
Uber’s modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicle.
Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis
Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts
in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s
robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly
hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project,
spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project’s
former
director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who
had
run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding
Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for
self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I
turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined
Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers,
robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal:
to
replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly
as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true
self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are
going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This
can’t just be about science.”
Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber
Photograph: Britta Pedersen/Picture-Alliance/DPA via AP
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to
summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone
that
no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded
as
the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and
Tesla
Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the
car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous
ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a
self-driving
car-sharing service to market.
Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver’s
seat
for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility
vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and
GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a
total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact
earlier
this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be
ready for the road by 2021.
The Volvo deal isn’t exclusive; Uber plans to partner with other automakers as
it races to recruit more engineers. In July the company reached an agreement to
buy Otto, a 91-employee driverless truck startup that was founded earlier this
year and includes engineers from a number of high-profile tech companies
attempting to bring driverless cars to market, including Google, Apple, and
Tesla. Uber declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, but a person
familiar with the deal says that if targets are met, it would be worth 1
percent
of Uber’s most recent valuation. That would imply a price of about $680
million.
Otto’s current employees will also collectively receive 20 percent of any
profits Uber earns from building an autonomous trucking business.
Otto has developed a kit that allows big-rig trucks to steer themselves on
highways, in theory freeing up the driver to nap in the back of the cabin. The
system is being tested on highways around San Francisco. Aspects of the
technology will be incorporated into Uber’s robot livery cabs and will be used
to start an Uber-like service for long-haul trucking in the U.S., building on
the intracity delivery services, like Uber Eats, that the company already
offers.
The Otto deal is a coup for Uber in its simmering battle with Google, which has
been plotting its own ride-sharing service using self-driving cars. Otto’s
founders were key members of Google’s operation who decamped in January,
because, according to Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski, “We were really
excited about building something that could be launched early.”
Volvo is expected to deliver a total of 100 specially modified SUVs to Uber by
the end of the year.
Source: Courtesy Uber
Levandowski, one of the original engineers on the self-driving team at Google,
started Otto with Lior Ron, who served as the head of product for Google Maps
for five years; Claire Delaunay, a Google robotics lead; and Don Burnette,
another veteran Google engineer. Google suffered another departure earlier this
month when Urmson announced that he, too, was leaving.
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to
be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an
alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re
not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is
basically existential for us.” (Google also invests in Uber through Alphabet’s
venture capital division, GV.)
Unlike Google and Tesla, Uber has no intention of manufacturing its own cars,
Kalanick says. Instead, the company will strike deals with auto manufacturers,
starting with Volvo Cars, and will develop kits for other models. The Otto deal
will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in
many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected
from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million
miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation
systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely
without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
In Pittsburgh, customers will request cars the normal way, via Uber’s app, and
will be paired with a driverless car at random. Trips will be free for the time
being, rather than the standard local rate of $1.05 per mile. In the long run,
Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even
for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a
private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan
Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”
Uber to Launch Self-Driving Cars in Pittsburgh This Month
Although Kalanick and other self-driving car advocates say the vehicles will
ultimately save lives, they face harsh scrutiny for now. In July a driver using
Tesla’s Autopilot service died after colliding with a tractor-trailer,
apparently because both the driver and the car’s computers didn’t see it. (The
crash is currently being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration.) Google has seen a handful of accidents, but they’ve been less
severe, in part because it limits its prototype cars to 25 miles per hour.
Uber’s
cars haven’t had any fender benders since they began road-testing in Pittsburgh
in May, but at some point something will go wrong, according to Raffi
Krikorian,
the company’s engineering director. “We’re interacting with reality every day,”
he says. “It’s coming.”
For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the
law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips
on
the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle.
A
co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop, and everything
that happens is recorded by cameras inside and outside the car so that any
glitches can be ironed out. Each car is also equipped with a tablet computer in
the back seat, designed to tell riders that they’re in an autonomous car and to
explain what’s happening. “The goal is to wean us off of having drivers in the
car, so we don’t want the public talking to our safety drivers,” Krikorian says.
On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part
of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while
crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take
the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back
under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” Krikorian says. “And there
are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”
Bridges are hard in part because of the way that Uber’s system works. Over the
past year and a half, the company has been creating extremely detailed maps
that
include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked
cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's
streets. As the car moves, it collects data, and then using a large,
liquid-cooled computer in the trunk, it compares what it sees with the
preexisting maps to identify (and avoid) pedestrians, cyclists, stray dogs, and
anything else. Bridges, unlike normal streets, offer few environmental
cues—there are no buildings, for instance—making it hard for the car to figure
out exactly where it is. Uber cars have Global Positioning System sensors, but
those are only accurate within about 10 feet; Uber’s systems strive for
accuracy
down to the inch.
When the Otto acquisition closes, likely this month, Otto co-founder
Levandowski
will assume leadership of Uber’s driverless car operation, while continuing to
oversee his company's robotic trucking business. The plan is to open two
additional Uber R&D centers, one in the Otto office, a cavernous garage in San
Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, a second in Palo Alto. “I feel like we’re
brothers from another mother,” Kalanick says of Levandowski.
The two men first met at the TED conference in 2012, when Levandowski was
showing off an early version of Google’s self-driving car. Kalanick offered to
buy 20 of the prototypes on the spot—“It seemed like the obvious next step,” he
says with a laugh—before Levandowski broke the bad news to him. The cars were
running on a loop in a closed course with no pedestrians; they wouldn't be safe
outside the TED parking lot. “It was like a roller coaster with no track,”
Levandowski explains. “If you were to step in front of the vehicle, it would
have just run you over.”
Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of
an
acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood
where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would
leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or
competitors. They’d grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city’s Ferry
Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company’s
trucks
to market faster.
For his part, Kalanick sees it as a way to further corner the market for
autonomous driving engineers. “If Uber wants to catch up to Google and be the
leader in autonomy, we have to have the best minds,” he says, and then
clarifies: “We have to have all the great minds.”