Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car - And How It Will Reshape Our World. Lawrence Burns
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members of the Robotics Institute faculty—the university’s equivalent of a supergroup.
Some in the university felt that this new group was so different it deserved a different name. Red Team had been appropriate in the past because it had been Red Whittaker’s baby. But this Urban Challenge was the best squad that Carnegie Mellon could assemble. Some of the veteran members of Red Team resented the rebranding. “It made no sense to us,” recalls Michele Gittleman, Red’s assistant at the time. “Everyone knew Red Team. The brand had already been established. We had hats, T-shirts, jackets.” Nevertheless, to reflect the sense that this was a new effort, fully backed by the university, the Carnegie Mellon team rebranded itself as Tartan Racing, in a nod to the nickname given the university’s sports teams, itself a reference to founder Andrew Carnegie’s Scottish heritage.
This latest effort was going to require a lot more than a million dollars to fund. So in 2006, Whittaker came and visited me at the General Motors Technical Center. “Why do you think you’re going to win this challenge?” I asked him. “Dust,” Whittaker replied, explaining that the robots created by many other teams treated dust clouds as impermeable obstacles, unable to be driven through, while Carnegie Mellon’s software and sensors were able to correctly tell that dust represented no obstacle at all. Although dust represented a comparatively small factor at the actual Urban Challenge, the answer convinced me. I liked Whittaker from the moment I met him. With his military bearing and his eminently American positivity, his confidence that ingenuity and hard work could solve any problem if you persevered, he struck me as a throwback to an earlier era of technical innovators, the sort of people who pioneered the automobile a hundred years before. I arranged for GM to back Tartan Racing in numerous ways. The corporation would end up providing Whittaker’s team with $2 million in support, making us the team’s lead sponsor. We also provided the services of some of our top engineers, and embedded one of them, Wende Zhang, with the Tartan Racing team in Pittsburgh. Tartan Racing’s vehicle would become a 2007 Chevy Tahoe dubbed “Boss,” after my long-ago predecessor as General Motors’ vice president of research and development, Charles “Boss” Kettering. Other sponsors also donating funding included the construction-equipment maker Caterpillar; the auto-parts supplier Continental; and Applanix, a manufacturer of GPS systems.
One of the new personalities on the Tartan Racing team was Bryan Salesky, who ran the software team. Salesky had been working at a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute spin-off called the National Robotics Engineering Center. Whittaker cofounded it in 1994 with $2.5 million in funding from NASA, to commercialize the technology created at CMU’s robotics department. The place is located in a nineteenth-century former iron foundry in the Lawrenceville area of Pittsburgh, on the shores of the Alleghany River. Its job was to partner with such companies as John Deere and Caterpillar to develop commercial projects like a self-driving harvester or an autonomous excavator. Shortly before work began on the Urban Challenge, Salesky was working on an autonomous navigation system for the U.S. Army. But the project wasn’t going anywhere, and Salesky was becoming frustrated with the slow rate of progress that he thought endemic to working directly with the government.
Just twenty-six years old, Salesky was, on the surface, a bit of a strange fit for such a senior position in Whittaker’s crew. Guys like Spencer Spiker, Kevin Peterson and Chris Urmson are equally at ease with welding torches and air impact wrenches as LIDAR sensors. Salesky is more at home in a computer lab than a mechanic’s shop. But he hit it off with Whittaker’s guys, particularly Urmson, likely because the two men shared a Midwestern distaste for pretense.
In 2006, as teams across the country geared up for the Urban Challenge, other figures who would become main characters in the mobility disruption began bumping up against one another. For example, Dave Hall and Anthony Levandowski. Hall, then fifty-five, was an inveterate tinkerer and self-trained inventor. He first gained notoriety in the world of high-end audio, having famously built his first amplifier at the age of four. Living then in Connecticut in a family with lots of technical heritage—Hall’s father designed atomic power plants, and his grandfather was a physicist—he already knew how to read electronics schematics when he went to college for mechanical engineering. While there he invented a version of a tachometer, a device that measured the rotational speed of things like wheels and propellers. Licensing the patent from that invention gave him enough income that, out of college, rather than getting a job, Hall moved to Boston to set up his own little technical shop. For a time, he lived by monitoring the world of government research contracts and building prototypes for the big defense firms. In the seventies, Hall invented a subwoofer, a type of speaker that provided clearer bass tones in stereo systems. With $250,000 lent to him by his grandfather, Hall moved to California and set up a company with his brother-in-law to manufacture the subwoofer.
That was in 1979. By the turn of the millennium Hall’s company had sixty employees and a few million dollars in annual sales. Hall made a good living, but he was bored. Building remote-controlled robots that competed to “kill” other machines on BattleBots, the television show, occupied him for a time. (One of his constructions, Drillzilla, relied on the blade from a circular saw as a weapon.) He competed in the first DARPA Grand Challenge with a Toyota Tundra entry notable for its use of a stereoscopic camera setup, rather than LIDAR, to sense the road. In the interim between the first and second races, Hall became fascinated with LIDAR’s potential. Tinkering as he was wont to do, Hall determined a way to cram sixty-four lasers on a single device, more than anyone ever had before. But the big innovation was that Hall’s LIDAR spun. Previous laser range finders had stayed static, shooting lasers to get a limited field of view, a little like the way a human sees the world only in front of his or her eyes. By mounting the device atop the vehicle and engineering the LIDAR so that it revolved ten times a second and 360 degrees around, Hall’s mechanism provided a complete portrait of the area around the vehicle. The new technology in effect created a three-dimensional scan of the world. It helped Hall’s robot progress along the second Grand Challenge route faster than most of its competitors, although a mechanical failure prevented it from finishing the race.
Once DARPA announced the Urban Challenge, Hall saw that his LIDAR would be even more valuable, because the 360-degree field of view that his device provided would help the robot detect oncoming vehicles in all directions. So he set up a manufacturing operation within his subwoofer company, Velodyne, and hired as a salesman one of the brightest minds from the first two races. The person he hired was Anthony Levandowski, the thin, six-foot-seven-inch UC Berkeley grad student behind the first challenge’s Ghost Rider motorcycle.
Which is how Levandowski came to be in Pittsburgh at the old Coke Works test facility—now referred to by most as Robot City—one day in late 2006, about a year before the race. Tartan Racing had bought one of Velodyne’s LIDARs—a significant investment at about $75,000 a pop—and Levandowski flew out to Pennsylvania to help Urmson and team install it. He set it alongside the other sensors that sat on the metal latticework on the roof of Boss, the Chevy Tahoe. Levandowski anchored down the sensor, activated it, and the numerous computer scientists and engineers who had gathered to witness this moment watched as the device generated the rotational momentum it required to work properly. On a nearby computer screen appeared the ghostly dot matrix that formed the device’s output. It was impressive—a million data points that could recognize up to 120 yards away everything from parking curbs to people’s faces.
Then something came loose on the LIDAR, and the rotational momentum flung a counterweight across the room—hard. Only luck prevented the wayward schrapnel from injuring someone. There was a shocked silence, and then came Levandowski’s voice.
“We’ll fix that,” said the gangly engineer.
Levandowski would become well known years later as the central figure in an important lawsuit between Waymo and Uber. Brilliant and ambitious, Levandowski demonstrated a tendency to get himself into situations others would characterize as conflicts of interest. He was often in demand at the smartest, highest-performing groups working on the most intriguing projects. Velodyne would ultimately sell its LIDAR to at