Self-Driving Car Startup Voyage Brings on Ex-Tesla, Cruise and Uber Exec as CTO
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Drew is currently busy at our Testing Grounds shipping a new release, but if there's any Voyage or self-driving car related questions I can answer, I'd love to hear em'!
My previous life was at Udacity, where I spent 4 years working on their self-driving car and machine learning curriculum. I learned a ton from working with Sebastian Thrun and the rest of the Udacity team.
Thanks for taking questions. Few questions:
1) What online resources do you recommend for someone that wants to go from beginner to skilled in the field of self-driving cars? Is there a sequence of courses that you could recommend?
2) What important concepts should this self-learner hone in on as they learn?
3) How can someone that does 1) (and has projects) break into the self-driving cars career?
1) If you already have a good grasp of Python, I always advise to start with the AI for Robotics MOOC at Udacity, which is my favorite class of all time. Once that's done, I'd take a look at their Deep Learning classes and the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree.
2) I think it's crucial to get to grips with how the whole stack works, so I always advise to get to grips with a middleware like ROS. Also, don't be afraid to dabble in algorithms (think problems in motion planning, computer vision, etc.)
3) The traditional programs (think PhD programs) create a lot of specialists focused on a single domain, but the industry is in dire need of more generalists. An engineer who is able to dive into any part of the stack is a huge value-add!
We will one day have a fully autonomous car with just a few cameras, but we may also have ultra-low cost high-performance LIDAR then.
It seems like the best self-driving systems are currently struggling with what seem to be fairly fundamental deficiencies (cant react to stationary objects on highways, dont react well to children and cyclists)
Is this a valid observation? What do you see as the biggest limitations in the current generation of self-driving technology?
This is similar to what Local Motors and Navya, which make minibus-sized driverless vehicles, are doing - the area and routes are very well known, but there may be some intrusions into the driving lane. Nobody has this working well enough for an airport parking lot shuttle yet.
It's too bad Waymo didn't continue with the Google mini-car. They could probably make this work. It's not as hard at 25MPH, because stopping solves most problems and sensor range is more than sufficient.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/technology/driverless-car...
We're heavily focused on a retirement city in Florida (125,000 residents on 750 miles of road) and on our G2 vehicle[1]. We recently signed a deal with Enterprise to commercially lease many, many more vehicles than our three initial prototype G1 vehicles.
1. https://news.voyage.auto/introducing-the-voyage-g2-autonomou...
I won't want to work for such a company either.
1. 2 solid years at Tesla
2. Then moved to Cruise (very easy to understand why someone would want that) but was acquired only 7 mo later. Not hard to understand why he wouldn't want to work at GM, not what he signed up for.
3. Then moved to Otto/Uber where he was for 4 years until now.
Interestingly, the way I'd phrase this case is to "give them more leeway" which is a closely related nautical term but seems to be used the opposite.
Edit: Thinking about it, I guess to "give them more leeway" is to give them more room to maneuver, while "give a wide berth" is to give yourself more room.
What makes Voyage different? From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities. Let's assume demand on these routes are high enough, and there are enough private communities to make a significant market. What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business? Let's say, hypothetically, I'm a self driving car engineer, why would I pick Voyage over other big players who have a lot more capital and much bigger team with a lot more people like Drew Gray?
>What makes Voyage different?
We are going to market with autonomous vehicles in a very different way, focusing on large private cities first and foremost. We intend The Villages, Florida to be the first (retirement) city that's traversable end-to-end (all 750 miles of road) in an autonomous vehicle.
We'll eventually make the leap to public cities, and it will feel gradual when it does happen.
We think about our technology quite differently, leaning on lots of partners for the infrastructure (mapping, simulation, sensors, tele-operation, middleware, and more) behind the scenes. This enforces a real focus on the un-solved autonomous algorithms.
We'll also be sharing later this year a project we're in the middle of that's dramatically different technologically to what we've seen elsewhere, utilizing the community itself to make a leap in autonomous performance.
>From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities.
We design our autonomous systems to traverse _any_ point-to-point route within an entire private (retirement) city. We intentionally don't just focus on a single, shuttle-like route. It turns out that pretty much any route in a place like The Villages is far less complex than other city-like environments, but that the business opportunity is just as large.
>What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business?
Voyage has exclusivity clauses in our agreements with our communities, where we also grant the community a slice of Voyage in the form of equity. Contracts are unfortunately meant to be broken, which means that we put a lot of effort into making sure relationships with these locations are great. We frequently host Town Halls and make sure the community is heard. This is crucial.
>I'm a self driving car engineer, why would I pick Voyage over other big players who have a lot more capital and much bigger team with a lot more people like Drew Gray?
It's a lot of fun here. Contrary to the hype, there's relatively few full-stack self-driving car startups at the Series A level. We believe our people, our technology, and go-to-market to be the best of that group.
Most importantly, when searching for new Voyage team members, we don't optimize for specific degrees or backgrounds. One of our greatest strengths is the team we've built with that philosophy.
For all the gripes I have with Comma AI, they have been the only ones consistently sharing progress with the public.
For people in medium income countries like myself avoiding a monopoly from Google is very important for the next 10-20 years.
Does Voyage plan to share some of it’s progress with the community on a liberal license?
Hi Oliver,
Udacity SDC alum here. Are there plans in the pipeline to open a subdivision on the East coast? I am super interested applying my education in new career opportunities but self driving car related jobs are tough to find near NYC.
1) How do you decide what you annotate and what not?
2) How do you manage your datasets infrastructure-wise (where and how is the data hosted, what software do you use to access and filter it, ...)