VO:"If the manufacturer could equip every car with an automatic driving mechanism..."
VO:"...the car would always do what it should do when it got on the road."
We’ve been promised a future with self-driving cars for a long time, but the technology available
today is finally starting to pay off on that 100-year-old promise. There’s an incredible
number of companies racing towards the autonomous vehicle future, which I’ve talked about
before. Tesla’s approach to that future is based on radar and computer vision, which
is what powers Autopilot, enhanced summon, and at some point, more self-driving features.
But there are some other pioneers in the space making interesting progress on autonomy from
a completely different angle. Waymo was kind enough to invite me out for an event to meet
some of their team, learn about their self-driving technology, what motivates them, and ride
in one of the Waymo One taxis operating in the Phoenix, Arizona area. My takeaway from
the experience surprised me.
Before walking through what I saw, take a moment and hit the subscribe button and notification
bell, so you don’t miss out on future videos just like this one. I’m Matt Ferrell ... welcome
to Undecided.
Taking a step back and looking at the history of self-driving cars is kind of amazing. This
isn’t a new idea at all and has been floating around in our collective imagination for nearly
100 years.
In the 1920’s, Houdini Radio Control showed off a radio-controlled car called, “American
Wonder” in New York City.
In the 1930’s General Motors sponsored Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibition with a
radio-controlled electric car using electromagnetic fields.
Jumping to the 1950’s, RCA Labs demonstrated a car guided by wires and embedded circuits
in the roadway.
In the 1960’s we saw the United Kingdom’s Transport and Road Research Laboratory test
a Citroen DS with embedded magnetic cables in a road.
By the 1980’s we started to see vision-guided systems from Mercedes-Benz. And DARPA-funded
Autonomous Land driven Vehicle (ALV) in the United States that used LiDAR, computer vision,
and robot controls.
In the 1990’s those technologies continued with tests across the United States, like
the Carnegie Mellon University’s Navlab project that drove cross-country 98.2% autonomously.
And in 2009 is when we see companies like Google jump into the fray with their X lab
self driving project. But in 2016, that project was spun off as its own company, Waymo, under
Alphabet.
When it comes to self driving, there are some guidelines for the different levels of automation
from the NHTSA:
Level 0 - No Automation. This is the majority of cars on the road.
Level 1 - Driver Assistance. This vehicle can assist with steering or braking, but not
at the same time. Think adaptive cruise control.
Level 2 - Partial automation. This vehicle can assist with steering and braking at the
same time, but still requires the driver’s full attention. This is where most modern
cars that have some kind of “automation” fall today. It’s basically lane assist and
adaptive cruise control.
Level 3 - Conditional automation. This is where a driver is still required, but they
don’t have to keep their eyes on the road. The car handles almost everything.
Level 4 - High automation. This is where companies like Waymo currently operate. A driver is
only required in certain circumstances, so if the conditions are right, then the car
can completely drive itself.
Level 5 - Full automation. Exactly what you’d expect. This is when no human driver is required
at any point.
So I’ve been an avid user of Autopilot on my Tesla, which is a next level driver assist
feature. It’s not self driving, but on the 5 levels of self driving, it’s somewhere
around a level 2 or 3.(fn) But Waymo has been operating at level 4 autonomy for some time
now and has been operating a taxi service called Waymo One in the Phoenix area. When
Waymo asked if I’d be interested in coming out to meet some people from their team and
experience their technology first hand, it was an instant yes. And to be clear, even
though Waymo provided the trip, that in no way has colored my perception of what I saw.
My opinions are my own.
One thing that’s a common misperception with Waymo is that it’s operated by Google.
I had thought that myself for a long time, but Waymo isn’t part of Google at all anymore.
After they were spun off in 2016, they’re a completely independent company under the
Alphabet umbrella. The name “Waymo” comes from its mission statement of “a new way
forward in mobility.” And after my meetings and conversations with employees, that mission
statement really seems to be ingrained in their culture. There is a genuine passion
and excitement around changing transportation to make it safer and more accessible. It was
apparent to me how much they believe in the mission and how moved they are to see their
technology is impacting people’s lives, such as the first blind person to ride on
their own in a self-driving car. ++Look up the name of the blind man++ You can also see
it in how the Waymo One app has been designed around accessibility. When the car comes to
pick you up, there’s a button in the app to honk the horn to help someone who has difficulty
with sight to find the car.
Where Tesla is relying completely on radar and computer vision for their self-driving
features on their fleet, Waymo has gone the path of computer vision, radar, and LiDAR
in their technologies. Pair that with the high resolution mapping that they do for the
areas in which they operate and you have a car that can easily achieve level 4 autonomy
today. Tesla is relying heavily on perfecting their machine learning models to achieve full
level 5 autonomy at some point in the future, but that means their cars are around level
2 and 3 today. Waymo's path has pushed them to level 4 very quickly and reliably, but
just like Tesla, are now refining and developing their models to hit level 5 at some point
in the future.
The big difference between the two is that Waymo is operating a fully functional taxi
fleet today within the zones where they’ve created high resolution maps. I’m not trying
to stir up a controversy, but Elon Musk has been very vocal that LiDAR is a crutch for
true level 5 autonomy. So is it a negative that Waymo is reliant on LiDAR and high resolution
mapping? I don’t think so. Far from it. There’s multiple paths to the autonomous
vehicle solution and what Waymo is doing is extremely impressive.
Before the trip, I knew that Waymo had been operating for a while in the Phoenix area,
as well as branching out to test in other cities in limited zones. But the scale of
the operation was much larger than I was expecting. They have hundreds of cars in their fleet
that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But they’re also testing cars in other areas
of the country to stress test their technology with extreme weather. Right now they’re
doing rain testing in areas of Florida. And they’ve also been doing winter weather testing
in Michigan.
For the actual ride in the car, we went on a 20 - 25 minute road trip around the Scottsdale
area. My brother, Sean, went with me on the ride and was just as excited as I was to experience it.
"Robots are driving the car."
The route took us through a pretty wide variety of environments like office park areas,
residential streets, to multi-lane roads with heavy traffic.
I have a little more experience with riding in a car that’s driving itself than my brother,
but even I was a little anxious the first couple of minutes of the ride. Pulling up
to a stop sign and then pulling out into traffic had me a little on edge at first. But something
really strange happened to both of us after the first couple of minutes. The car drove
exactly like a person would in every situation we were seeing. It was like a switch flipped
and went from something novel and crazy, to something pretty mundane. It was kind of crazy
how normal it felt. As my brother put it, “Okay ... it’s just a car that’s driving.”
As a UI/UX designer, I immediately focused in on the passenger screens in the back seat.
I was completely blown away by how well they were designed, and how much thought, testing,
and iteration must have gone into it. During our conversations with the team, they talked
about how much time they put into trying to understand how to make people comfortable
with a self-driving car. And this UI design was proof of that effort and time. It communicated
exactly what the car was doing at every moment, as well as what the car was seeing.
The screen would show a ping-like effect every couple of seconds that showed you the LiDAR
dots of what the car was seeing in the surrounding environment, which included everything from
parked cars, to people, to vegetation. When the car was about to speed up, the route line
would get a pulse of brighter green. If there was a stop light coming up, a small stop light
would show up in the upper left corner of the screen and show you that the car recognized
it as red, yellow, or green. Every piece of the UI was carefully constructed to show you
what the car was seeing and why it was doing what it was doing. I was blown away by that.
And to Tesla, I really hope they take a look at that UI because it’s incredible. I’d
love to see them take cues from that with the Autopilot UI.
With the high resolution mapping that they’ve done, the car also took speed bumps and dips
in the road like a champ. And near the end of the route we took the car had to turn left
at a very busy multi-lane road. The car slowly edged its way out into the center of the intersection,
waited for the light to turn yellow, and waited for a break in oncoming traffic before making
the turn. It took that turn exactly like I would have done. The only issue I had was
how aggressive it was with the pumping of the brakes as it worked its way into the intersection.
Other than that, it was a flawless ride.
My one big takeaway from this weekend was that autonomous vehicles in our lives isn’t
something in the distant future, but is limited to where you can experience it. It’s not
something that’s a year or two away from widespread use, but is something we’re going
to see more and more of over the coming decade. Waymo’s current fleet of modified Chrysler
Pacifica’s are about to be joined by their next generation car that’s built on a Jaguar
iPace. They’re also testing semi-trucks decked out with their self driving technology,
and are doing test runs with empty trailers to fine tune that system. It’s a good example
of how this technology can be modified to run on a very wide assortment of vehicles.
These types of autonomous systems have more awareness of their surroundings than we do.
They can process that information much faster than we can. And have quicker reaction times
than we’re capable of. In the end, these systems will be better and safer drivers that
the rest of us. There’s no doubt in my mind that this type of thing will eventually be
ubiquitous and that this is the future of transportation. It’s something we’ve been
promised for decades, but the technology had too many compromises to make it viable. But
that promise has hit a point with technologies like LiDAR, computer vision, radar, and machine
learning that are bringing it much closer to reality. It’s Waymo’s thoughtful user
experience design that impressed me the most though. For autonomous cars to be accepted,
it’s important to have a system that’s designed from the ground up to be useful for
those with special needs; to address people’s fears and anxiety around getting into a car
without a human driver; to not focus on the technology alone, but how this technology
can and should be integrated into our lives.
This isn’t to say that I don’t have reservations about self-driving technology, I do. As excited
as I am, I’m also concerned by the ramifications of drivers losing their jobs. What this will
mean for our daily lives and the future of transportation is going to be profound. It
has the potential to be a paradigm shift and change a lot of things we’ve accepted as
immutable. I think there’s far more pros than cons to this shift, but it’s something
that we need to think about and address as self driving becomes more widespread.
What do you think? Are you excited for self driving to because a part of everyday life?
Jump into the comments and let me know.
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