We're working on riderless and balance-assisted bicycles and motorcycles. We're working to ship our flagship bike and we're about to launch a balance-bike for kids that helps them learn faster and sets up virtual bumpers while they learn.
You should track down the one-man team from the first DARPA Grand Challenge who made an autonomous motorcycle. I was on a team with a real truck, so I didn't have to figure out how to balance a two-wheeled vehicle while also trying to figure out how to autonomously make it through an obstacle course. From an insiders view, we all thought he was the star of the show.
Holy shit I never put that together. He was always just tinkering in his garage by himself as far as I remembered. We had a lot of bugs in our truck (like everyone) so we would get burned out and walk around and talk to each other. There was a lot of sharing with the smaller teams. Way later I realized I had a long conversation with Sebastian Thrun about how we did our throttle feedback actuator. He was lucky to have a drive-by-wire SUV and we were all mechanical. Those were super fun times hanging out at the raceway for trials those first two years.
Regen will usually only gain you 3-5% total range, most of the power from biking is dissipated as heat through aero drag, even if you're biking up and down hills. Source – my company exclusively does ebike research and development.
Ebikers naturally start taking routes that optimize for safety and enjoyment over avoiding hills. It would be cool for Strava or Goog Maps to detect ebikers (easy to tell from speed vs road grade) and weight their routes more heavily in deciding the best route to recommend.
> to detect ebikers (easy to tell from speed vs road grade) and weight their routes more heavily in deciding the best route to recommend.
seems like an anti-pattern that screws over people who don't have e-bikes.
If users can tell us that they're using an e-bike and we give a separate option then both e-bikers and pedalers can have navigation options that work best for the specific use case, rather than shoehorning both into the same option.
We need to stop assuming things using ML and pretend like that's somehow more user-friendly than the user directly telling us what they want. (See: constant griping about how poorly non-verbatim Google search is getting)
I also grew up in NZ idolizing Faraday. I feel sad to see obviously smart and passionate folks like this with deep technical interests end up in venture so young.
I'd rather have smart, passionate people with deep technical interests judge whether to fund my company than a dumb, lazy person who doesn't know math or science :)
Exactly, with her background and informed outlook [1] she’s probably picking up on ideas that other investors would miss. In addition, being in venture now doesn’t preclude direct involvement in research or startups in the future.
You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.
This is bizarre, I’m in non-car autonomy but I talk daily with car autonomy folks. Everyone has been expecting a consolidation of companies through acquisitions but drive.ai showed us that it’s probably not going to happen. At The Information mobility event last month one of the SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else. Looks like backing up billions with more billions might be the playbook for now.
> SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else.
Lol, of course they said that as their entire investment strategy is to throw more dumb money at startups than anyone else can possibly match. Their vision fund VC has been investing $100 billion dollars and they're planning on doing another $100 billion dollar fund. "To put the fund’s magnitude in perspective, its size is almost double the investments made by U.S. venture firms last year. PitchBook data shows that VC fundraising in the U.S. totaled $53.9 billion last year across more than 200 funds, and that was the largest annual raise in at least a decade." [0]
I think the corporate types are assuming that throwing money and engineers at the problem is going to "win" it, but I'm not sure it will. Google has plenty of both of those things and they seem to be stalling at the moment, or the very least they're not confident enough to go out and claim the market for themselves.
I think the engineers have been probably been wildly optimistic as usual, and the last 5% of car autonomy is going to take as much effort as the first 95%, or maybe double that.
Not sure how many Data Scientists you know but I've worked with hundreds over the years and have never met a single one who was irrationally optimistic about the work they do. In fact generally it is the opposite.
But you know the sort of people who are wildly optimistic and prone to over-exaggeration. Executives like Musk.
as another datapoint, I worked at GRASP lab and half of my classmates went Waymo, or some other self driving car company. They go there because of the calibur of co-workers, many of them do no believe self driving cars on residential roads is possible within the next 10 years. In fact, one of the robotics professors here (who is no stranger to PR hype) said: self driving cars with pedestrians on the roads is impossible
Most are optimistic about highway driving in California though.
Hm, I would say that some consolidtion happened with that deal. Quote: "VW is also handing over Autonomous Intelligent Driving, the self-driving subsidiary that was launched just two years ago to develop autonomous vehicle technology for the Volkswagen Group. AID is valued at $1.6 billion.
The Munich-based AID team will become Argo’s European headquarters, a move that will expand its staff 40% to more than 700 employees."
AID has been Audi's L4/L5 development arm, which was separate from VW's main research arm. It also helps to judge the size of this deal, because VW only seems to invest one billion in capital and the remaining 1.6 billion investment is AID. It would be interesting to know, how they came up with that valuation ...
It's R&D and depends on a lot of new innovation to be solved (new ASIC hardware for real-time inferencing, new ML model types -- potentially a new breakthrough even).
> SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else.
Listen to them more. What else do you expect fund managers to say?
We will not see any real self driving in our generation, and may be not even after. That is much more for practical consideration than that of technical possibility.
Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads
> We will not see any real self driving in our generation, and may be not even after.
I think we can once we build purposeful infrastructure (think cars "on rails" with mesh-coordinated intersections).
> Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads
Argo, although lesser known (but still out of early Waymo and CMU's Robotics Institute), is every bit as competitive as the other major players. If anything, they are less bombastic than the Elon Musks of the world falsely tweeting that we would all be taking naps in our cars by last year.
>> We will not see any real self driving in our generation,
I agree.
But we'll be driven a large percent of trips, in the near future.
There's on-demand shared(few people in a vehicle) riding - which can be quite cheap AND fast. ridewithvia.com seem to scale with that model pretty fast. A combination of that with strong public transport systems and regulations may beat cars.
But also, a combination of partial self-driving(highway, etc), with remote control driving, could work.
I've done this math before and it's not encouraging. Global carbon fuel burning is more than two cubic miles annually. A billion trees will capture about a trillion kgs of carbon over 10-20 years, but yearly we're burning about 4 trillion kgs of just crude oil.
1B hectares of trees supports approx. 1T trees. As with everything, it will not be the solution to climate change and has to live alongside other measures. But it is one of the cheapest (in terms of money) and least radical (in terms of lifestyle adaption) measures we can take for the effect it will have. This study shows that the earth has enough space. It will require a shift in priority for many governments (e.g. Brasil) though.
Up to 2500 hundred trees can be planted in a hectare. Which is over a trillion trees. I think that coincides with an article on planting a few trillion trees to offset climate change.
On face value that sounds absurd, though in reality seed distribution may be automated and scaled in a feasible manner. Certainly the number of corn plans planted in the US alone must be an astonishing number if calculated per capita.
I did undergrad at UW, several of my classmates did grad work on LIGO and were on the gravity wave teams when they had their first detection. Amazing what timing can do for a career. I visited Hanford LIGO in 2012 before the detection, really interesting back then to hear their frustrations and steady commitment.
I graduated and did a few strtuos, now working on autonomous self-delivering ebikes in SODO.
Cool video of moto carrying stuff (just like the 2016 google prank vid) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sqyjag9yRUA