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How Pittsburgh Became Uber’s Driverless Testing Ground
- hprotagonist 10y agostep 0: poach an entire department from CMU.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoTo be clear, they hired most of their talent away from CMU's National Robotics Engineering Corporation, CMU Robotics Institute's commercial arm -- not actually faculty.
- jayjay71 10y agoThey hired some faculty as well, although the vast majority were senior personnel at NREC.
- brandonmenc 10y agoIf a car can drive itself around Pittsburgh, it can drive itself anywhere.
- grecy 10y agoYour experience in North America is mundane compared to what the world has to offer. Quito, Rio, Lagos and the other mega-cities of the developing world are so much more chaotic. I look forward to driving in the big cities of India one day :)
- tomschlick 10y agoNo doubt. Between all the bridges, narrow roadways, winding hills, inclement weather and mislabelled streets we (Pittsburgh) present a big challenge for human drivers let alone robots. Glad to see all the Uber SD cars buzzing around shadyside the past few months though.
- mynegation 10y agoSeconded. Of all places in North America PGH for me is the most stressful place to drive. The use of GPS for someone not familiar with the city is obligatory and even then you need to stay exactly in the right lane at the right time. Other places in the world can present different type of stress like hectic streets of India, China, or South East Asia, but there you have an option to slow down and do a lot of honking. Not so much in PGH. It is combination of three rivers, hilly terrain, complicated interchanges and numerous bridges, but knowledgeable locals just vroom by.
- Isamu 10y agoI am sad about the slow but steady loss of the few remaining cobblestone streets around Pgh. But have you seen the wooden street in Shadyside? That's still there.
- Hydraulix989 10y agohttp://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/06/05/construction-begins-to-replace-brick-road-in-oakmont/ http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/06/05/construction-begin... At least they are still keeping the brick road in Oakmont. I had to check online to make sure.
- lbrandy 10y agoFirst time I ever went to Pittsburgh, driving w/o a gps, we were trying to find 6th street. We were on an avenue hoping to see numbered cross streets. We ended up at the intersection of 5th avenue and 6th avenue (https://goo.gl/maps/MSJC93Z4rLC2 https://goo.gl/maps/MSJC93Z4rLC2). I remember just laughing. Which way do we go? Any way will do I guess.
- Frondo 10y agoThis was in Austin but I always got such a kick out of it :) The intersection of Barton Hills Drive and Barton Hills Drive: https://goo.gl/maps/HaA3iSvxZm22 https://goo.gl/maps/HaA3iSvxZm22
- mountaineer22 10y agoEh. Test it in the rural mountain roads of West Virginia.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoAnd Boston while you're at it.
- Sniffnoy 10y agoNon-mobile link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring-it-on-how-pittsburgh-became-ubers-testing-ground.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring...
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we updated the submission from http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring-it-on-how-pittsburgh-became-ubers-testing-ground.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-br....
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoI wonder how people felt when the automobile revolution was taking place. Probably a mixture of all the same things people are feeling now, human nature being what it is. Could probably look up the newspapers of the time to get a feel. I like that bit in the article where it says the local politicians have stayed out of the way - that's the sort of thing politicians mostly should do. For me the real turning point will be when the first passenger hails an autonomous vehicle that doesn't have a human behind the wheel, I'll be satisfied with a remote operator, because that will be truly novel as current laws asume a human behind the wheel.
- icebraining 10y agoFor a perspective on how the automobile revolution was viewed: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...
- joe_the_user 10y agoThe auto revolution was awful. We can hope the self-driving revolution is something of a counter-revolution, turning the auto into a better-behaved tram, allowing driving time to become free time, etc.
- notyourwork 10y ago> a better-behaved tram I have always felt this way. If everyone driving looked at the bigger picture, it would be a much more efficient and pleasant place. Road rage, traffic jams, death, all these things are mostly the result of human error and poor mental judgement.
- themartorana 10y agoI agree that mostly it was people, not the machine. That's the basis of my love affair with autonomous cars - remove humans from the equation and watch casualty numbers plummet.
- mlinksva 10y ago
- cmurf 10y agoWhy is it OK to protect American IT jobs with limited (or expensive) H-1Bs, but it's Ok to replace commerical drivers with autonomous vehicles? Why is one kind of protectionism Ok and the other overdue for being squashed?
- shiftpgdn 10y agoOne doesn't involve a flood of immigrants basically working as slaves.
- Hondor 10y agoPeople don't care about immigrants working like slaves because that's what they'll be doing in their own country anyway.
- falsestprophet 10y agoDo you really not see a distinction between allowing sewing machines and allowing unlimited immigration of sewers?
- riffic 10y agoCalling anyone a "sewer" is not appropriate. I assume the words you're looking for are either 'tailor' or 'seamstress'.
- powera 10y agoThis whole comment thread is absurd and unreasonable.
- falsestprophet 10y agosewer: a person or thing that sews. 1350-1400; Middle English; see sew pronounced soh-er, not soo-er as in sewer: an artificial conduit, usually underground, for carrying off waste water and refuse, as in a town or city. 1375-1425; late Middle English suer (e) < dialectal Old French se (u) wiere overflow channel http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sewer http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sewer
- Animats 10y agoSingapore already has some autonomous taxis in test.[1] They have a backup driver on board, as do Uber and Google. [1] http://mashable.com/2016/08/25/driverless-cars-starts-singapore/#drtTnH6as5q8 http://mashable.com/2016/08/25/driverless-cars-starts-singap...
- yari_ashi_zero 10y agoI lived in Pittsburgh from 1989 to 1991, very close to Carnegie Mellon University. One of their technical departments (CMU) had a self-driving car (really a van like a UPS van) even back then ; we saw it driving around our neighborhood sometimes. I think it always had an operator standing by inside it, for override.
- Animats 10y agoThat was the NavLab, an autonomous vehicle with a crew of 5. I was in it once when I visited CMU. Rack-mounted workstations in the back with up to 3 operators, a driver, and someone with a keyboard in the passenger seat. Top speed about 5 MPH. First 3D LIDAR. Good ideas, nowhere near enough compute power or good enough sensors. Or precision GPS, which modern self-driving cars lean on too much.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago> That was the NavLab, an autonomous vehicle with a crew of 5. And a "Nobody on board" yellow diamond sign in the window. Pfui.
- Animats 10y agoThey had to start somewhere. But progress was too slow for years. Tony Tether at DARPA came up with the DARPA Grand Challenge because he thought the DARPA-funded automatic driving projects needed a serious kick in the ass. It worked. (The reason it worked is not well known. Some major research universities were quietly told by DARPA that if they didn't do well in the Grand Challenge, their DARPA funding would be cut off. Suddenly entire CS departments were being devoted to automatic driving. Levels of effort went from 5 people to over 100, and not at DARPA's expense.)
- jayjay71 10y agoI can't tell from the picture, but their test track looks like where we used to test self-driving cars when I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. Except when I was doing it, it was basically dirt (most of it not even roads) in a super-sketchy part of the city. The Roundhouse, where we kept the cars, looked like an abandoned building - in fact, and I am not exaggerating, 1/3 of the roof had collapsed in on the building. It'll be interesting to see what impact this has on the city of Pittsburgh. Mayor Peduto is definitely a progressive guy who is very gung-ho about reinventing the city. Here's another interesting fact - almost none of the initial 40 engineers that Uber poached from NREC had any previous experience with self-driving cars. Those guys mostly went to Google, and a handful created a startup called Ottomatika which was acquired by Delphi.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoDid you do any tests at Allegheny airport?
- jayjay71 10y agoI never did, but I don't know too much about what they did after I left. We did most of our testing on a construction site near a defunct steel mill. Otherwise we sometimes drove around the city, usually Southside as it was nearby and great for testing. There was a media release about driving the car to the Pittsburgh Internatioal Airport. http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/september/sept4_selfdrivingcar.html http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/september/sept...