9 ms·
GM to buy LIDAR sensor-tech firm Strobe
- jakarta 9y agoKyle Vogt blog post on the deal: https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were-solving-the-lidar-problem-8b4363ff30db https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were-solving-the-lidar-probl...
- Fricken 9y agoIt's also worth reading Kyle's blog post from last week. Cruise is doing some stuff that nobody else can do. Not even Waymo: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in-sf-is-challenging-but-necessary-1f3f7ccd08db https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in... GM right now is the most vertically integrated of all the companies making meaningful progress on Robotaxis. They have a dedicated assembly line set up building off the Chevy Bolt platform, and intend to have 'thousands' of them on the road before the end of 2018. They're building their own ride hailing app, called Cruise anywhere, currently only available to GM employees. They've got On-star, which provides in-house expertise with connected car and vehicle diagnostic services. GM's Maven subsidiary offers car sharing services. But when Robotaxis really proliferate fleet management infrastructure will be very important. Apple and Waymo have made partnered with Hertz and Avis respectively, but General Motors can utilize the real estate and expertise of it's existing network of dealerships, which can save them from a great deal of capital investment as Robotaxis dissemintate. Before last December there wasn't a whole lot to be known about Cruise's progress, but since then it's just been one reason after another to be getting excited about what they're doing.
- saosebastiao 9y agoThat article was interesting. I've been a truck driver, with recurring jobs throughout San Francisco, and can attest to how nerve-racking it can be. In order to drive trucks there successfully, you have to know the roads really well, as your GPS is often worthless (so many different rules, changing conditions, unpredictable drivers/cyclists/pedestrians, as well as truck-specific restrictions). From a pedestrian safety perspective, I really appreciate that there are companies that are prioritizing San Francisco as a testing ground. I still think Seattle is more difficult to drive in. The streets are narrower (most residential streets are two way, but only wide enough for one car width, requiring drivers to negotiate with other drivers on how to proceed). There are far more 3,5,6 and even 7 way intersections[0]. Just as many hills as San Francisco, but the several poorly-intersecting street grids give the hills much worse visibility. And I'm willing to bet we have way more construction than San Francisco. [0] https://vimeo.com/124481186 https://vimeo.com/124481186
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago>I really appreciate that there are companies that are prioritizing San Francisco as a testing ground. I think it has more to do with them not having a snowball's chance in hell in Boston, Rome or New Delhi (in increasing order of difficulty). We haven't even seen a driver-less car floor it on a green to make a left before the opposing traffic moves.
- muraiki 9y agoIn Pittsburgh this is known as the "Pittsburgh Left", although there are various other cities and states that lay claim to the name! :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
- astrange 9y agoSF has plenty of unprotected left turns against traffic. I haven't seen a driverless car outside Mountain View, but hopefully they actually make those turns and don't just get stuck? That said I remember the occasional drive straight down a cliff in Pittsburgh beating even the SF hills.
- ihoshjd 9y agoYeah, certainly one of the key ways pedestrians are killed, entilted drivers who can't be bothered to wait. Unprotected left turns are one of major ways pedestrians are murdered by careless drivers.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe usual definition of murder is that of an intentional act.
- CamperBob2 9y agoWe haven't even seen a driver-less car floor it on a green to make a left before the opposing traffic moves Of course, this isn't an issue in San Francisco, because the intersection is completely gridlocked. The only way you're going to make a left turn -- or even a right turn at many intersections at rush hour -- is by violating various traffic laws up to and including the Pauli exclusion principle. I can't imagine how to build a self-driving car that can perform both safely and effectively in any major urban environment... and I'm not the type of person who says "I can't imagine" lightly. It would literally be easier to work on autonomous rockets at SpaceX. With self-driving cars, the engineering problems are largely social, not technical.
- RandallBrown 9y agoI never thought about car companies being able to use their dealerships for their fleets. That will actually be a pretty huge advantage in smaller towns where there won't be enough business to have the cars driving continuously.
- fma 9y agoIt's not really "their dealerships". A car dealer is an independently owned franchise. None are owned by the car manufacture. Of course, the manufacturer can say "we will give you $x off your car purchase if you let us use your lot" but the reality is the dealership can just tell them to take a hike. Also, manufacturers lease to rental car companies. So that is an option as well. I can imagine Enterprise having unrented cars in a lot that switch to robotaxis...
- koiz 9y agoAren't they still working out the actual software... To make all of this work...hardware wise they are ahead but people around here have been tooting the GM horn just because they can produce cars.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoThey also have invested in Lyft for $500 Million USD. See https://blog.lyft.com/posts/lyft-1billion-gm https://blog.lyft.com/posts/lyft-1billion-gm
- Fricken 9y agoVogt did an interview with Forbes earlier this summer, in which he implied that the Lyft investment was done on the initiative of some other arm of General Motors, and that Cruise doesn't need no stinking rideshare partnership. I guess we'll see how that plays out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beaaidqx4vA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beaaidqx4vA
- zitterbewegung 9y agoIsn't it just a hedge if Cruise doesn't work out? Or GM for that matter?
- apohn 9y ago>...but General Motors can utilize the real estate and expertise of it's existing network of dealerships, which can save them from a great deal of capital investment as Robotaxis dissemintate. I was involved in a project at a major US auto maker where they wanted to utilize spare capacity at the dealers on something similar to what you are discussing. In this case, we would pay the dealers to utilize that capacity. In some states, the dealer networks are large, politically very influential, and are not inclined to allow anything that will disrupt the status quo of selling and leasing cars. They absolutely had their hands around the throat of the auto maker and forced us to go another route just because they saw what we were trying to do could possibly change their income flow in some small way. In theory, GM has the infrastructure and is making the right acquisitions. In practice the vast majority of the company is entrenched in selling and leasing cars and many people in the company don't have the imagination to see the world differently. GM has a lot of internal and external politics to overcome before they are successful with autonomous cars and Robotaxis.
- vvanders 9y agoYeah, additionally dealerships are commonly multi-regional run under different names so finding competition within a brand can be difficult. Generally you tend to have to go 150-200mi to get to a different parent company.
- balsam 9y agoI gather that cheap quantum LIDAR[1] is their edge. Anybody care to provide more details ;)? [1]https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-quantum-LiDAR https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-quantum-LiDAR
- deepnotderp 9y agoVery interesting and possibly scary for LIDAR startups (e.g. Luminar). If I'm not mistaken, the Strobe LIDAR is a flash LIDAR?
- deepnotderp 9y agoApparently it's actually frequency modulation lidar https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/gm-cruise-snaps-up-solidstate-lidar-pioneer-strobe-inc https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
- Animats 9y agoStrobe seems to be using some very advanced physics. Here's a paper on quantum LIDAR.[1] The semiconductor technology is exotic.[2] The detectors in the research papers require cooling to superconducting temperatures, but apparently that can be overcome. It's amazing this technology is making it to the automotive environment this fast. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6627.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6627.pdf [2] http://www.princetonlightwave.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-Apr-PhotonicsJ_629_Mirin-SP-and-PNR-Detectors.pdf http://www.princetonlightwave.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...
- deepnotderp 9y agoWait what? I was under the impression this was a frequency modulation LIDAR?
- post_break 9y agoI can't wait until LIDAR stuff ends up in junk yards from totaled cars in the future. I'm sure there will be a bunch of amazing uses for it.
- csours 9y agoIf only iPhones used LIDAR...
- kileywm 9y agoIf autonomous vehicles are a success, then there may be surprisingly few totaled cars in the future, compared to what we see today. I'm excited for that and agree with you that some really cool stuff can come out of the salvage of the future. It's interesting to think about the situations where even the most sophisticated sensors and software may be unable prevent an accident that can total the vehicle. Animal crossings, catastrophic vehicle part failure, surprise road debris, etc...
- jamiequint 9y agoIf autonomous vehicles become a success you'll just be able to buy LIDARs for super cheap because the market for them will drive prices down significantly.
- freehunter 9y agoYou'd think so, but there are a lot of things that have a big commercial market but are basically non-existent in the consumer space unless you're willing to rip them out of commercial products. As just one example, you can buy one 7" HDMI touchscreen (just the screen) for $100 shipped [1] or for the same money you can buy two Amazon Fire tablets with the same size screen but twice the resolution, plus it has a full mobile SOC with a quad core processor and a camera and I mean it's a full tablet. Not just the screen. And it's half the price. Even if Amazon is losing money on each Fire sold, I can't imagine they're losing that much. They're getting those screens for a hell of a lot cheaper than I can, and better quality too. I imagine LCD touchscreens have a far bigger consumer demand than LIDAR sensors ever will, so the dream of cheap LIDAR sensors from Sparkfun will forever remain a dream. Grabbing one from a junk yard will be the better option. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/2407 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2407 [2] https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Tablet-Alexa-Display-Black/dp/B01GEW27DA https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Tablet-Alexa-Display-Black/dp...
- syntaxing 9y agoAnyone care to explain the technological situation of Cruise? I feel like I read mix messages all the time about them. Some say that Cruise is just putting up smoke and mirrors while others make it seem like they're the closest thing to level 4/5 autonomy compared to anyone else. I'm super curious where they actually stand in terms of technology.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The blog post linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 sure makes it sound like they are making serious progress on the hard problems.
- Animats 9y agoThe problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The CA DMV autonomous vehicle reports of accidents and disconnects are the closest thing available to objective data right now. Waymo is way ahead on disconnects. Cruise is getting rear-ended a lot lately. Google used to get that a lot, but they seem to have gotten past that. (The main compatibility problem with autonomous vehicles so far is being rear-ended. The typical situation is that the autonomous vehicle advances into an intersection, detects some good reason to stop like cross-traffic previously occluded, stops, and gets rear-ended. The accel/decel profile for entering occluded situations may have to be made more compatible with human behavior to get the human drivers behind to behave properly. This isn't a big problem; damage in those collisions is very low.)
- ChuckMcM 9y agoHeh, that would be inside information would it not? If nothing else, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit shows how hotly contested self driving technology is, and LIDAR technology in particular. I've built a number of mobile robots over the years, and watched many others build them as well as part of a robotics club. One truism is that most robotics problems are pretty easy given ideal sensors and sensors for every variable :-). When I started building robots I quickly understood that 'sensor fusion' is more about trying to tease reality out of a very noisy cloud of data than it is AI or fancy software. I spent a month trying to get a robot to go precisely straight so that my dead reckoning algorithm would work.
- vkuruthers 9y agoAnyone have any info on how the Strobe Lidar(s) compare to Velodyne systems?
- mhb 9y agoIn a document prepared for a Korean trade delegation to Silicon Valley in May, and obtained by IEEE Spectrum, Strobe claimed that its prototype lidar had a range of 300 meters, a processing time of fewer than 45 milliseconds, and cost less than $100. It also noted that its first product would be commercially available in the spring of 2018. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/gm-cruise-snaps-up-solidstate-lidar-pioneer-strobe-inc https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
- was_boring 9y agoIs this retail, wholesale or cost to make prices? As someone who works on their own cars, electric and self-driving cars have me scared that it will not be possible in the future.
- Shivetya 9y agoI figure a great deal of this will be standardized with modules you swap out like you do a water pump and sensors like light assemblies. plus it is not like all these older cars are going anywhere. people vastly over estimate how fast self driving cars will arrive and just as much the electric only revolution
- danblick 9y agoIMHO it's fun to think about the economics of autonomous vehicles. For example, here's a neat article on "second order effects" of electric and autonomous cars [1]. (examples: Increased use of autonomous cars could mean less space lost to parking lots in cities. Higher utilization for cars could mean faster turnover (~3 years/car instead of ~10).) One thing to think about: autonomous cars might make a big difference for car-sharing services or trucking, but they're less essential when you're driving the car yourself and parking in your garage. I think traditional cars will be around for a while. (Particularly in lower-density areas where there's less demand for ride-sharing services.) This article [2] suggests regular cars may be around until 2050 or so: "According to IHS, a firm that provides automotive forecasts and insights, sales of autonomous cars, including driver control, will begin by 2025 and could reach 11.8 million in 2035; sometime after 2050, says IHS, almost all vehicles will be autonomous." So your hobby is probably good for another 30 years at least? [1] http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second... [2] http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_FullSpeed_McKinsey.pdf http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_F...
- rikelmens 9y agoThis guy seems to be the master mind behind GM's explosive growth in this area: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostojic/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostojic/
- Fricken 9y agoCan I ask why you say that? Not that I disbelieve you, but there isn't very much public information about Sasha Ostojic to go off.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hayd 9y agoHmmm, so LIDAR isn't as worthless as Uber tried to make out in their Waymo lawsuit...