Starsky Robotics (YC S16) Drove a Fully Driverless Truck and Raised $16.5M
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
"Working with partners, we will use unmanned trucks to haul freight in 2018." These guys are 5% of the way to where they need to be. This is a business where your bug reports are written in blood.
What they seem to have is an ordinary lane-keeping / auto brake system, like a lot of cars, plus drone-type remote control. All cameras, no LIDAR. Looks like a standard anti-collision radar in the front bumper. The steering motor doesn't seem to be redundant. This is demo-grade technology with too much hype and a tear-jerking video. They put that crap on the road and they're going to kill somebody.
Even Otto was better than this when they did their Budweiser demo on an empty road in Nevada. They at least had a potentially working technology. Years later, now owned by Uber, it still barely works.
The problem is, most of the industry has spent the last decade adding neat features and trying to improve their reliability...without much practical thought as to increasing controllability (in terms of accident avoidance) in the inevitability of a component failure.
Controllability has basically been shortcut by keeping a driver behind the wheel. We've done pretty significant testing - regularly hauling freight on the highway while in self-driving, no-one behind the wheel in super unstructured environments, dealing with extreme edge cases w/o intervention.
The big technical accomplishment that we're showing here, is that our system is controllable in the inevitable case of failure...without using a physically-present human as a crutch.
All that matters in the end is the safety and cost of the resulting system. Remote assistance operators and bandwidth are not cheap, and a system that has a high level of remote faults is most likely operating too far out of operational domain to be truly safe.
[0] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
That's not fair, Waymo and others are using redundant backup systems and obviously try to think of every failure case they can. Besides, aren't the remote-control parts as likely to fail as any other? I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive a car over facetime...
If Tesla's self driving truck division did a crappy demo then fair enough, but cut these guys some slack, at least they aren't in a cubicle at facebook trying to find better ways to sell ads for toilet paper.
Edit: I think I overreacted a bit and shouldn't have flagged it. But I don't think the commenter you replied to did and can see why that comment is on top.
This isn't webcrap, where it doesn't really matter if it fails now and then. People die when self-driving vehicles screw up. Especially with heavy vehicles. California DMV doesn't allow self-driving heavy vehicles on the road yet, and that's probably a good decision.
If YC is going to fund stuff like this, they need to get some avionics people on the team. Before they kill somebody.
To be fair, this is an absurdly competitive space. If they achieved something of similar magnitude for a problem dozens of other teams weren't already solving, it would seem much more impressive.
Are you saying it would be more impressive if dozens of competitors weren't already doing what they're doing? I feel like you're arguing against Starsky's competence by pointing out that they're in a competitive space with noncompetitive technology.
The challenge is; who changes a flat tire? who inspects the vehicle after it's been parked? who hooks up all the break lines to the trailer? who gasses it up? who will check that the idiots on the dock loaded it correctly? who will smell the burning brakes on a steep incline? how will stranded trucks be rescued? The driver is kind of like a guardian of the freight, always looking out for the delivery's best interest, no matter the issue.
It's waaayy more of a business process and parternship problem than a technology one. You're going to have to negotiate contracts with tow truck companies and service stations across the continent. You're going to have to figure out some way to cross borders without a truck driver. You're going to have to hire all sorts of operations staff to manage the trucks. I'm actually much more curious about this aspect of the problem than the technology problem. I am tempted to think it takes more people to manage remote trucks than just having a driver.
The use case that we're solving to is the big company driver who, at the first sight of trouble, calls dispatch to send out a tow truck so that they don't waste precious hours of service. The folks who use the full-service gas stations to fill up.
A lot of long-haul truck driving has already been setup to limit the participation of the on-board driver. We're just taking that a step further.
One of the issues I have with all the technological unemployment discussion. The ONLY reason automation will destroy jobs is due to greed. Good companies will now utilize there newly freed up and empower3d employees to 10x there productivity.
Self-driving trucks always seemed like a no-brainer to me, but as I start to actually examine the space I realize it's more complicated than I initially thought. It'll be fun to watch from the sidelines, but I suspect there will be 1, maybe 2 big winners in this space.
Similar some of to the others - we've hauled freight autonomously (we've actually hauled quite a bit of it), but we've also done yard jockey work in truck yards and done whole trips that didn't require a person in the vehicle.
Anyway, rather than argue, I wish you luck. I've got no horse in this race.
We do that remote thing with military drones with pilots sitting in Nevada controlling drones in Afghanistan but the real time requirements for that are much lower, i.e. can fly for long periods without worrying about traffic or very restricted flight near areas needing traffic control /no dogfighting capability - they can fire a few missiles at mostly static targets on the ground.
Has anyone done any estimates on what kind of latency requirements are necessary for that? There's got to be some mention of the reaction time interval or something somewhere?
^ That would be interesting me also for the perspective of understanding what new markets would be opened by what new wireless technology (à la disruption curves in Innovator's Dilemma)
What about a two-driver solution with two independent internet links?
Couldn't the buses be piloted remotely?