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You may not think that autonomous technologies and politics have much in common, but at least in one way they overlap significantly: yesterday's enemy may be tomorrow's ally.
That was the message we slipped on Thursday night at a small industry event in San Francisco where we had the chance to meet Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company that (among others) tries to transform the people and goods are moved.
It was a big day for Urmson. Earlier the same day, his two-year-old company announced $ 530 million in Series B financing, led by leading Sequoia Capital, including a "significant investment" by T. Rowe Price and Amazon.
The tour for Aurora – which builds what he calls a "pilot" technology that he hopes will eventually be incorporated into cars built by Volkswagen, Hyundai and Chinese Byten, among others, is very remarkable, even in an ocean of gigantic fund. It represents not only Sequoia's first bet on any autonomous driving technology, but also an "incredible support" from T. Rowe Price, Urmson said Thursday night, suggesting that it shows the brand's "think long-term and strategically" . [that] we are the independent option of autonomous cars. "
However, the most interesting aspect of the cycle is that it includes Amazon, one of the most profitable companies in the world, which could lead to a variety of scenarios, including the acquisition by Aurora of a fleet of deliveries supervised by Amazon, until its final acquisition by the company. . Amazon has already started to market more aggressively to global automakers and leading suppliers that focus on building connected products, claiming that its AWS platform can help them accelerate their pace of innovation and reduce their costs. In November, she also launched a world-wide autonomous stand-alone racetrack for four-wheeled racing cars, designed to help developers better understand reinforcement learning, a type of learning by the way. machine. Imagine what he could learn from Aurora.
Indeed, at the event, Urmson said that Aurora "had built our funding cycle, [we were] We are thinking strategically about how to succeed in our driver construction mission. What a driver can do is move people, but he can also carry goods, and it's harder to think of a company where the transportation of goods is more important than doing it. Amazon. "Calling Amazon" incredibly technically savvy ", he said:" have the opportunity to badociate them with us in this round of financing, and [talk about] what we could build in the future is great.
The Aurora site also contains wording on "changing the way people and goods move".
The interest of Amazon, T. Rowe, Sequoia and Aurora is not surprising. Urmson was the official technical manager of Google's autonomous car program (now Waymo). One of its co-founders, Drew Bagnell, is an auto-learning expert who still teaches at Carnegie Mellon. Previously, he headed the Uber Self-Reliance and Perception Team. His third co-founder is Sterling Anderson, the former program manager for Tesla's autopilot team.
In fact, Aurora's big news seemed to scare Tesla's investors, as the electric car manufacturer's actions fell as the media reported details. Development seems to be the kind of possibility that had disrupted Tesla President and CEO Elon Musk when Aurora was launched a few years ago. Tesla almost immediately started a lawsuit, accusing Urmson and Andersonn of trying to poach at least a dozen Tesla. engineers and accusing Anderson of taking confidential information and destroying evidence "in order to cover his tracks."
This lawsuit was dropped two and a half weeks later in a settlement in which Aurora paid $ 100,000. Anderson had said at the time that the amount was to cover the cost of an independent auditor to search Aurora's systems for confidential information about Tesla. Urmson reiterated Thursday night that it was an "economic decision" to prevent Aurora from further intruding into intense conflict.
But invited to talk about his relationship with Musk on Thursday, Urmson, who previously called Tesla's trial "clbady," refused to bite the hook, explaining to the public that Aurora and Musk, "were mistaken for foot". A little later, he extolled the virtues of Tesla's autonomous driving technology, adding that "if it could be used in the future, it would be great."
Aurora, who is also competing with Uber, sees Uber as a potential partner down the line, Urmson said. Asked about the company's costly self-driving efforts, the magnitude of which has been drastically reduced over the eleven months that have elapsed since one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, Urmson reiterated that "Aurora" is delivering the driver, and Uber needs many pilots, so we think it would be wonderful to work in partnership with them, in partnership with Lyft, in partnership [with companies with similar ambitions] globally. We see these companies as partners in the future. "(He would have added that there was" nothing to discuss at the moment. ")
Prior to Thursday's event, Aurora had sent us more detailed information on the four divisions that currently employ the 200 people that make up the company, a figure that will obviously increase with its new series, which it plans to use to develop its Current talent, hiring many people and expanding the tests it performs, both on the roads of California and Pittsburgh, where it is also very present.
We did not have the chance to lead them during our conversation with Urmson, but we thought they were interesting and you might think so too.
Below, the "hub" of the pilot Aurora. It is the computer system that powers, coordinates and fuses the signals of all the sensors in the vehicle, runs the software and controls the vehicle. Aurora said it has designed the Aurora driver to seamlessly integrate with a wide variety of vehicle platforms of different makes, models and clbades, in order to take full advantage of the benefits of its technology.
Below, a visual representation of Aurora's perception system, capable of understanding the complex urban environments in which vehicles must navigate safely among many moving objects, including bicycles, scooters, pedestrians and cars. .
Aurora is building its mapping system to ensure that it naturally calls for the highest level of accuracy and scalability, so that company-powered vehicles can understand exactly where they are going. can be found and easily update the maps. as the world changes. We asked Urmson if, when the technician would finally be ready to use cars, he would affix a white mark on the technology or rely on the Aurora brand. He added that the issue had not been resolved yet, but seemed to suggest that Aurora was heading in the last direction. He also said that the technology would be installed on the floors of automakers (with the help of Aurora).
Aurora says it can effectively develop a robust "driver" by building its own simulation system. He uses his simulator to test his software with different scenarios encountered by vehicles on the road, which allows repeatable tests impossible to achieve by simply traveling more kilometers.
Aurora's movement planning team works closely with the perception team to create a system that detects important objects on and around the road and attempts to accurately predict future behavior. The ability to capture, understand, and predict the movement of other objects is critical to developing a technology that can navigate real-world scenarios in dense urban environments. Urmson has already stated that Aurora had designed this process in a way superior to the competitors: sending the technology back. Specifically, he told The Atlantic last year: "The clbadic way to design a system like this is to have a team working on perception. They go out and make it as good as they can and they reach a plateau and give it to the movement planners. And they write the thing that determines where to stop or how to change lanes and deals with all the noise of the perception system because it does not see the world perfectly. There are errors. Maybe he thinks he's moving a little faster or slower than he is. Maybe from time to time, it generates a false positive. The motion planning system must respond to this.
"Motion planners are therefore behind perceptions, but they have understood everything and everything works well – as well as possible with this level of perception – and the perception that people are saying," Oh, but we're not good at it. have a new thrust [of code]. & # 39; Next, movement planners find themselves behind the ball again, and their system deteriorates when it should not. "
We also interviewed Urmson about Google, whose standalone unit was renamed Waymo while she was coming out of the Alphabet umbrella to become her own business. He was very diplomatic, saying only good things about society and, when asked if they ever challenged him to challenge him since he left, they said no. As he has said in previous interviews, he explained, Aurora's main benefit lies in the fact that she was able to use the knowledge acquired by her three founders and from scratch, while the big companies they own come can not.
As he said last year at TechCrunch in an interview about how Aurora tested his technology, "there is a really simple measurement that everyone uses, which is the number of kilometers driven , and it's one of those things that really suited me the best. home [Google] because we are there and do much more than anyone at the time. So that was an easy number to say. What is lost in all this is that it is not really the volume of kilometers traveled. It's really about their quality. "
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