
Uber Opening Robotics Research Facility in Pittsburgh to Build Self-Driving Cars - foobarqux
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/02/uber-opening-robotics-research-facility-in-pittsburgh-to-build-self-driving-cars/
======
krschultz
Google opens an Uber competitor. Uber opens a Google (research) competitor.

It will be interesting to see which one can commodize the other. I feel that
what Google has built (self-driving cars) is harder to replicate, but Google
doesn't have the killer instinct that Uber does.

If Android is any guide, Google would rather spread their innovation around to
partners rather than to use it to build a killer first party product. I
imagine Google will license their future self driving-car stack to the
existing car manufacturers, Uber, et al.

~~~
lazaroclapp
Say what you wish about the fractured Android ecosystem, but it managed to get
>84% of the market-share vs <12% for iOS, despite having arrived later and
being (at least in its earlier incarnations, before Android 4.x) a much less
polished product. Samsung alone has more users than Apple does. Spreading
their innovation around to partners was a killer move from Google the same as
selling their software to IBM clones was a killer move for Microsoft.

Note: Not arguing that Apple's strategy was unsuccessful in the least, but
Google wouldn't have been able to beat Apple at their own game (integrated
hardware-software luxury-branded product) at the time of the iPhone/Android
release.

~~~
puranjay
It's because of the cost, nothing else. Everyone I know would switch to iPhone
in a heartbeat if they had the Rs. 60k you need in India to buy one. My
Android phone, on the other hand, cost me Rs. 13k.

Android thrived because shelling out a month's salary on phones is a losing
proposition in third world countries (which have the majority of phone uses)

~~~
rednukleus
This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end
phones that cost the same amount as iPhones. I have owned both, and found the
Android to be a much better user experience. iPhone has the worst keyboard
I've ever used, the screen on the 5 was way too small, and I just find the
whole UI to be really clunky and badly designed for the way I use devices (eg.
The lack of a back button and inconsistent way apps try to deal with this
limitation)

Sure, plenty of people like iPhones and plenty of people would swap, but I
know a lot of people who really don't like iOS and are far happier with a high
end android

~~~
dougabug
Apple's profits from the iPhone alone in the last quarter exceeded the total
profits of Google and Microsoft combined.

~~~
rednukleus
This is both true and completely irrelevant.

~~~
dougabug
How so? This is about Google's relative competitiveness. You seem to blithely
dismiss Apple's success with iOS relative to Android, claiming that high end
Android phones sell in comparable quantities. This is patently contradicted by
the facts. If the goal of an enterprise is to make profits, Apple is crushing
Google in the mobile device business.

~~~
eitally
Google & Apple aren't remotely in the same business WRT mobile. Apple is
hugely successful, no question, with their success riding largely on four
factors: 1) industrial design, 2) idiot-proof OS, 3) zero hardware diversity,
4) 3rd party developer support. Google is hugely successful, too, but they
have no mission statement that says they are intending to squeeze every last
penny from the mobile market. I mean seriously, the last number I heard was
that there were close to 1500 people working on Chrome-related stuff. The fact
is that Google makes "small" (hundreds of millions to a few billion) amounts
on a broad variety of things, and underwrites the spectrum of R&D/engineering
via their advertising juggernaut. Whether they do well at this or not is
another question, but they are not competing with Apple on hardly any fronts.

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mkempe
Back in 1987, Carnegie Mellon already had robotic _vans_ [1] trying to drive
around the campus. They were slow-moving, so students had ample time to cross
the road as they approached. I probably have a picture in a box, somewhere. As
I recall a major issue was how to stay on the road. [2]

[1]
[https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub2/thorpe_charles_1988_1/...](https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub2/thorpe_charles_1988_1/thorpe_charles_1988_1.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/thorpe_charles_1988_1/...](https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/thorpe_charles_1988_1/thorpe_charles_1988_1.pdf)

~~~
Animats
I was in the Navlab once. It had a crew of five - a driver, an operator, and
three people in the back at rack-mounted workstations. They had to convert the
thing to hydraulic motor drive so it could drive slowly enough.

Their LIDAR was very advanced. They had a 2-axis scanning LIDAR, with one
rotating and one nodding mirror. So they had full 3D depth images. Most of the
DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles only had line scanners.

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Qworg
Actual Uber announcement: [http://blog.uber.com/carnegie-
mellon](http://blog.uber.com/carnegie-mellon)

I'm not sure a "partnership" qualifies as "cleaning out".

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omarforgotpwd
Google probably wants to run a big data center that coordinates and organizes
all the world's cars. A reliable centrally coordinated self driving vehicle
network would greatly canabalize air and train travel and cargo, so the
winners in this space will control the world's transporation network. Google
will probably win, but either way the world economy will benefit massively
from the reduction in transportation costs.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
Google may benefit from it, but it's not like it would be irreplaceable.
Google would just have the advantage of pioneering a new market.

Besides governments in other countries (since I assume US will stay "wild
capitalism" for longer than others) can just call an open competition for such
controlled network management services and then be semi-controlled by that
government.

It's not like google or anyone gonna have full actual control over who goes
where even when/if such system will exist.

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Animats
That makes sense. CMU has been working with Cadillac on self-driving cars, and
has demoed them in Washington DC traffic. The CMU/Cadillac car has nothing
visible externally which marks it as a self-driving car. They may be closer to
a production product than Google.

~~~
jayjay71
I'm pretty sure they aren't partnering with CMU, but rather offering many
senior scientists and faculty members lucrative salaries to leave academia and
work for them. So the Cadillac IP still belongs to the university. In fact,
that actually spun out into a separate company called Ottomatika (which has a
licensing deal from CMU).

~~~
Animats
They are formally partnering with CMU. Here's the CMU press release.

[http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/february/uber-...](http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/february/uber-
partnership.html)

"Uber and Carnegie Mellon University are announcing today a strategic
partnership that includes the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies
Center in Pittsburgh, near the CMU campus. ... The agreement also will include
funding from Uber for faculty chairs and graduate fellowships."

~~~
jayjay71
I stand corrected.

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ThomPete
So Uber is using low wage drivers to make money so they can invest in self
driving cars to completely make the drivers obsolete.

Talk about a moral paradox.

~~~
akshatpradhan
I'm ok with that. These drivers will move onto intelligent work where they can
get trained in less menial work. The only reason a taxi driver stays a taxi
driver is because he believes he has no other alternative to make money. Let's
get them training in customer service or creative work and give them human
jobs.

~~~
EpicEng
"These drivers will move onto intelligent work where they can get trained in
less menial work"

Can you point to any time in history where that actually occurred on a large
scale? Genuinely interested.

~~~
jessriedel
75% of the US used to be farmers.

(Not all of farming is menial, but a lot of it is and it was much less
sophisticated than it is today).

(Edited 90 --> 75.)

~~~
ThomPete
The transition went much much slower than it does today most people are
missing a very important point here.

We aren't just talking about automation of physical things we are also talking
about automation of intelligence based tasks.

Also people often bring out the horse carriages as an example of how the
people who controlled those just went on to become car drivers instead but the
horses they never found new occupation.

Automation is replacing higher and higher levels of thinking and that is the
problem. Its not just going to compete with you for your physical abilities
but your mental ones. That's the big deal and thats where we are headed.

Driverless cars illuminates that point quite substantially.

------
seanp2k2
I'm imagining a future where there are self-driving busses that route
themselves based on where people are and where they want to go. For a dense
urban area, I think this has real potential to increase route efficiency and
bus utilization while decreasing crowding and unpopulated bus trips.

~~~
sinatra
Bus routes/schedules influence riders' behavior (People reach a bus stop at
the time when they expect their bus to arrive). If buses try to automatically
adjust route and timing based on riders' needs, riders will start showing up
whenever and wherever they want. That makes me feel that the buses may become
less utilized, not more.

~~~
1971genocide
I do not think so, Many times bus routes are created without thinking about
traffic. An app like that that dynamically updates based on where the "blob"
of riders are would be awesome.

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loceng
This feels a bit strange, no? Shouldn't all of their drivers immediately stop
using Uber?

~~~
threeseed
Be serious.

Neither Uber nor Google have ANY experience making cars. They aren't the
simplest products to sell. Complex regulations that varies city by city, state
by state, country by country. And even then the minute you become successful
the existing car manufacturers will simply jump into the market and swallow
you whole.

Uber drivers have absolutely nothing to worry about.

~~~
ForHackernews
All the car companies are working on autonomous vehicles, too. I think you're
right that Uber and Google don't know enough about building cars, I think the
smart money is that somebody like Volvo[0] or Volkswagen will be first to
market with a commercial autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle.

[0] [http://www.cnet.com/news/a-ride-in-volvos-autonomous-car-
how...](http://www.cnet.com/news/a-ride-in-volvos-autonomous-car-how-the-next-
step-in-driver-safety-requires-replacing-the-driver/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Self-driving cars is mostly a software / data problem, not a car problem.
Google is much better positioned for that than car manufacturers.

~~~
ForHackernews
(Leaving aside privacy issues for the moment) An existing car manufacturer
could build sensors/data collection into their entire fleet over a period of
several years. They could monitor the environment around millions of cars and
learn to model driver behavior.

I don't know how many Google Maps cars Google has, but if car manufacturers
got serious about data collection, there's no way Google could compete with
the scale of their installed user base.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's just collection, but you need also need real-time processing. I'm
pretty sure Google has more software engineers and computer scientists at hand
than any car manufacturer.

~~~
ForHackernews
Sure, but a car company could hire software people, or contract with somebody
like IBM.

Most of what Google is doing with their self-driving car is _not_ a difficult
software or AI problem, they've simply built extremely, extremely detailed
maps of a limited subset of roads: [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-self-
driving-car-maps/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-self-driving-car-maps/)

Contrast that with the DARPA challenges, where a car needed to navigate
unpredictable off-road terrain:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge)

Doing it Google's way, you need some sensors and onboard processing, but the
amount of hardware is actually pretty minimal compared to Carnegie Mellon's
self-driving cars. Most of the fancy hardware is for _making_ the maps, not
driving the car.

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Zigurd
It's interesting to see comments of the nature of "Google doesn't have the
killer instinct that Uber does."

This is a fight over the businesses of logistics and transportation in
general, and on a global scale. You can expect Amazon to join the fight. This
is not limited to driving people across town, and winning is vastly more
valuable. Nobody is going to hold back.

~~~
lkbm
I always felt like long-haul B2B deliveries (e.g., from warehouse to
supermarket) was the most sensible starting point for actual use of self-
driving vehicles on the roads. No worries about convincing customers to give
up control, the extra equipment overhead is probably relatively small when
you're already working with a massive truck, no stopping to sleep/eat, no
tired drivers...

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enahs-sf
I find it interesting that Google will probably mint a nice ROI from it's Uber
investment and ostensibly dump it all right back into research for robotic
cars (I get this isn't how it works, but the idea is novel). CMU has some of
the most brilliant minds in robotics - It should be very interesting to see
who wins this arms race.

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terravion
This seems like this should be easy to source... should we call the robotics
institute? Cleaned out seems a bit hyperbolic.

------
coldcode
Self-driving cars in a world where all cars are self-driving is doable. Self-
driving cars sharing the road with the morons I deal with every day is not
going to happen any time soon, much less dealing with accidents, road
closures, ice, snow, rain and the occasional angry politician.

~~~
ahallock
This is irrational. If self-driving cars are overall safer than their human
counterparts, why wouldn't we allow a mix? I mean, we don't ban human drivers
because of all the accidents and deaths caused of human errors, so why would
be not allow self-driving cars, even with some failures?

~~~
Lambdanaut
> This is irrational

Humans can be pretty irrational, and law unfortunately isn't enacted in the
science lab. We'll just have to wait and see who wins on the political level.

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NittLion78
We're one step closer to Johnny Cab, though I suspect it will work a little
better than the version in Total Recall.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGi6j2VrL0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGi6j2VrL0o)

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fspacef
Either way, Google vs. Uber means cheaper cab rides for all of us...

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monkeyninja
Imaging that, we can get rid of all drivers, must be brilliant...

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Intoo
soon techcrunch headlines would be: UBER DRIVERS LAID-OFF, REPLACED BY SELF-
DRIVING CARS

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zobzu
Heh so thats what this uber job offer was about.. i should have replied! ;)

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clientbiller
Sniff Sniff... I smell a buyout coming.

