Saturday, 20 August 2016

How a robot lover pioneered the driverless car, and why he's selling his latest to Uber

Anthony Levandowski is one the most influential engineers behind self-driving vehicles. Now that Uber has bought his latest startup Otto, he talks about how it all started

Self-driving vehicles have been developed in many places, over many years, but few people have as strong a claim as Anthony Levandowski to being considered their inventor. And it all started with a phone call from his mother.
“My mom called me up and said, there’s this robot race it would be interesting for you to find out about,” he recalls. That race was the 2004 Grand Challenge, the first of three long distance contests for driverless cars organised by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa. “I was like wow, this is absolutely the future.”
With the help of fellow engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, Levandowski built Ghostrider, a 90cc Yamaha motorbike modified to balance and ride itself using motion sensors, video cameras and GPS. He chose a nimble two-wheeler because he thought better funded teams would quickly get four-wheeled driverless vehicles working perfectly.
“I expected the problem to be solved on cars on race day,” says Levandowski. “That was a huge miscalculation because 12 years later, it’s still not solved.” None of the dozens of competing vehicles finished the course, and Ghostrider (which is now in the Smithsonian) did not even make the final. But Levandowski had found his life’s calling. “It struck a chord deep in my DNA,” he says, “It was almost like discovering electronics. I didn’t know where it was going to be used or how it would work out, but I knew that this was going to change things significantly.”
Fast forward to this 2016 – and that significant change is happening. Uber just announced that self-driving cars will start pick up passengers later this month in Pittsburgh. And the man leading the project, alongside Uber’s multi-billion dollar efforts to automate long-distance trucking, delivery and passenger services? Anthony Levandowski.
“In 30 years, every single new car will be autonomous. That’s completely obvious,” says Levandowski, who was also the engineer responsible for Google’s first driverless car.
“But it will take a long time for the technology to be ubiquitous. It’s probably one of those things where we overestimate it in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.”

Relationship with Google

Levandowski himself could not be accused over underestimating the potential of robotic vehicles. After building Ghostrider, he put the first driverless car on public roads in 2008, and sold a start-up to Google that formed the nucleus of its self-driving car project. His latest venture, an autonomous truck company called Otto that only launched in May, is being bought by Uber for an estimated $680m.
It was at a second Darpa race, back in 2005, that Levandowski met Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford computer science professor. Thrun eventually recruited him to Google, to work together on its Street View mapping project.
“After a year of doing that, the robot itch came back,” says Levandowski. A TV producer friend suggested that Levandowski build a self-driving pizza delivery vehicle for the Discovery Channel show Prototype This! “Google was very supportive of the idea, but they absolutely did not want their name associated with it,” he says. “They were worried about a Google engineer building a car that crashes and kills someone.”
So Levandowski set up another company, called Anthony’s Robots, to keep the technology giant at arm’s length. In less than a month, Levandowski and engineers had built the Pribot – a self-driving Toyota Prius with one of the first spinning lidar laser ranging units, and the first ever to drive on public roads.
On the day of the shoot, San Francisco police closed a five mile route to traffic as the Pribot could not yet detect other vehicles or pedestrians. The car made the trip almost without incident, just scraping a tight exit on the Bay Bridge. “You’ve got to push things and get bumps and bruises along the way,” says Levandowski. “But we did it in four weeks and that really got me jazzed about going back to robots.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were pretty jazzed, too. They gave Levandowski the budget to bring the Pribot into a secretive new unit of Google called X, dedicated to “moonshot” technologies and headed by Thrun. Within a couple of years, Google had quietly acquired both of Levandowski’s companies, Anthony’s Robots and 510 Systems.
Although some of the startups’ engineers wanted to work on self-driving vehicles on their own, Levandowski has no regrets to selling up. “Google was the right place to pioneer robot cars,” he says. “In 2008, no one else would ever have believed me that we were going to make a car actually drive everywhere, all the time.”
For the next couple of years, until a story in the New York Times revealed their existence, Google’s growing fleet of Priuses roamed the streets of California without anyone noticing. “If people asked us what was on the cars, we’d say, it’s a laser and just drive off,” says Levandowski with a laugh.

Uber buys Otto

In 2011, Levandowski helped lobby the state of Nevada to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles, and even put a Prius through the world’s first self-driving test to demonstrate its safety. “Nevada was all about removing an excuse for the engineers to not ship the technology,” he says. “But that’s when I realised it wasn’t ready. It was clear we had to do more work to improve the technology’s reliability.”
For the next five years, Levandowski helped Google expand its fleet to dozens of vehicles, including prototype self-driving cars without manual steering wheels, brakes or accelerators. In January this year he left to found Otto, a startup dedicated to giving truckers the freedom to take naps during long distance highway drives. Uber agreed to buy the company in late July, with Levandowski reporting direct to Uber founder Travis Kalanick.
Levandowski admits there are technical challenges to perfecting self-driving taxis like those Uber is developing. “Surface streets are probably a hundred to a thousand times more complicated than highways,” he says. But he is confident that autonomous vehicles will eventually “save on average more lives than any other technology that’s been created before”.
He also thinks that any legal and regulatory hurdles that exist today will melt away once the superior performance of self-driving cars is demonstrated. “As soon as it’s ready, it’s going to be legal. If we can show it’s safe, there’s no reason why it should not be allowed,” he says. “There will be fewer deaths, and we can’t stand in the way of that. Robots here we come!”

Saturday, 13 August 2016

Delphi plans to test self-driving cars in Singapore

Delphi will be the lead company in the consortium, which will have a half-dozen members.

DETROIT -- Delphi Automotive has agreed to form a consortium to operate six self-driving vehicles in Singapore, part of an Uber-style ride-hailing service that will allow the supplier to test its technology on busy city streets.
The service is to debut next year, the supplier said in a statement Monday. Initially, the vehicles will have backup drivers that will take over if the vehicles malfunction, said Glen De Vos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering.
If the test proves successful, the vehicles will operate without human backup toward the end of the consortium’s two-and-a-half-year contract with the city.
“By the end of it, we’ll demonstrate a fully autonomous, driver-out-of-the-car capability,” De Vos said last month during a press briefing in suburban Troy, Mich. Delphi hopes “to prove that the technology is robust and that consumers will use it.”
Although De Vos expects car sharing and ride hailing to be increasingly popular in urban areas, he notes that the test also will help Delphi improve anti-collision technology for vehicles sold at retail.
Singapore is familiar territory for Delphi, which has an r&d center and a factory there. Delphi will be the lead company in the consortium, which will have a half-dozen members. De Vos said it is premature to name the other members of the consortium, citing the need to formalize the partnerships.
For the Singapore fleet, Delphi will retrofit six vehicles with cameras, radar and lidar. De Vos did not identify the model, but noted that it will be an electrified vehicle with five or six seats.
In 2015, Delphi engineers took an Audi SQ5 crossover retrofitted with self-driving technology for a coast-to-coast road test. This time, the company will choose a different model, De Vos said.
Tough test
Singapore is likely to be a tough test. Delphi’s fleet will share the road with cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles and anything else that plies the city’s crowded streets.
Customers will summon the vehicles with a smartphone app -- Uber-style -- and can take one of three fixed routes to or from various mass transit terminals.
Each route will stretch for several miles, and passengers will be allowed to exit anywhere along the route. Each vehicle will have high-resolution maps of each route -- with its attendant lane markings, signage and landmarks -- and a central command center will monitor the progress.
After Delphi eliminates the backup drivers, each vehicle will be programmed to pull over to the roadside if the technology malfunctions. Thus, Delphi will avoid one of the big challenges for self-driving cars: how to transfer control safely to a human driver.
That issue has drawn scrutiny since a Tesla Model S operated in Autopilot mode struck a semitrailer on May 7 near Williston, Fla., killing the driver.
In the short run, Delphi will avoid such problems by having professional drivers in each vehicle. In the longer run, Delphi plans to emulate Google, which has deployed a self-driving car fleet in its hometown of Mountain View, Calif.
Google’s cars pull over if its technology malfunctions. Passengers are not expected to take over. 

Saturday, 6 August 2016

Elvis Presley's rare BMW 507 rediscovered and restored


Even when he was a soldier, Elvis Presley lived like a king.
While he was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army in 1958, the rock and roll star bought a 1957 BMW 507 roadster that had previously been used for racing and as a show car by the automaker.
The 507 was one of the “it” cars of the era, and Elvis’ Feather White model got more than its fair share of attention. As the story goes, so many of his female fans used to write notes on it in lipstick that he had it repainted red.
After completing his service, Elvis brought the car back to the Unted States in 1960, but soon traded it in to a dealer who flipped it for $4,500. During its 1955 to 1959 run, BMW only built 254 examples of the 507, and today they’re worth up to $2.5 million.
That is, of course, if they’re in perfect condition. The person who bought Elvis’ car modified it for racing with a Chevrolet V8, plus a new gearbox and rear axle, cutting the frame in the process.
By 1968, it had changed owners a couple of times and ended up in the hands of collector Jack Castor, who stored it in a “pumpkin warehouse” in Alabama to await a restoration that never happened.
Castor had heard rumors, but never knew for sure if his 507 had belonged to Elvis, until he read a 2006 article in “Bimmer” magazine about the search for the car. He invited the writer to come by and take a look, and its serial number confirmed the provenance of the now severely deteriorated car.
Eventually, BMW Group Classic bought the 507 from Castor, along with some spare parts that he’d collected over the years, and shipped everything to Germany for a full restoration in 2014. Castor died later that year shortly after the work on the car began.
The 507 was completely disassembled, and the paint removed with acid and alkaline baths. Many replacement parts were recreated using a mix of old and new manufacturing methods, with extras made for other 507s in need. It’s no surprise that the Chevy V8 was replaced with a correct BMW 3.2-liter V8.
To finish the original look, a fresh coat of white paint was applied using the same procedure that would’ve been used when the car was first built.
Elvis fans can keep their checkbooks in their pockets, however, because the car is not for sale. But they can get a look at it when it makes its first public debut at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on August 21st.