
Starsky Robotics (YC S16) Drove a Fully Driverless Truck and Raised $16.5M - jayzalowitz
https://hackernoon.com/starskyunmanned-de7af7e5a38b
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Animats
So they drove a bobtail tractor 7 miles on an empty straight road with a
human-driven blocking vehicle to prevent anybody from passing. We could do
better than that in 2005 with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. Everybody in
the DARPA Grand Challenge did better than that. And they call this a
"product".

"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.

~~~
stefan8r
You DARPA Grand Challenge guys certainly built some impressive stuff back
then, and it's hard to shake a stick at what those teams accomplished.

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.

~~~
Game_Ender
It’s open secret in the SDV industry that all the top players have remote
assistants systems, and that it is the to key removing operators from the
vehicle. It’s a little disengenus to claim that Starsky is the sole player
exploring this space. There are startups that provide full remote vehicle
control [0], and GM’s acquisition of Cruise 1.5 years ago was in part driven
by an especially good demo of their remote assistance tech.

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...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/ces-2018-phantom-auto-demonstrates-first-
remotecontrolled-car-on-public-roads)

~~~
Animats
Either you have a lot of remote drivers, or you get the "your call is
important to us" wait.

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jbob2000
I think the challenge of remotely controlling a truck is not the technology.
There are lots of videos on youtube of guys who convert cars to remote
controls in their garage. Mythbusters did it regularly for some of the car-
related myths. (I do not mean to belittle the work of Starsky Robotics, just
noting that they're "formally" doing stuff that people have already been doing
for a while now).

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.

~~~
stefan8r
That's a fair thought when you compare unmanned trucks to O/Os, who really do
bust their butts to make sure the freight gets there.

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.

~~~
jbob2000
Thanks for the response! Admittedly, I haven't had much exposure to long-haul
trucking. My uncle did short hauls around the province, so my comments come
from hearing his experiences over the years.

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Judgmentality
Good for Starsky, but from what I can gather after reading this article they
are behind Embark, TuSimple, and even Otto - not to mention whatever Tesla,
Daimler, and other big names are doing.

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.

~~~
stefan8r
Not that I know of: none of those folks have actually taken the person out of
the vehicle, and getting someone in the truck is the main problem the industry
faces.

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.

~~~
Judgmentality
So really this is just a demonstration of the truck being remote controlled
and being monitored by a full-time driver in a remote location? Okay, I can
see why that's an important tool to make this a viable product, but it doesn't
scale and doesn't strike me as a differentiator (I know some of your
competitors already do this).

Anyway, rather than argue, I wish you luck. I've got no horse in this race.

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redlollipop
How does this differ from Uber's recent AT deployment?
[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/ubers-self-
drivi...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/ubers-self-driving-
trucks-have-started-hauling-freight/)

~~~
stefan8r
We started doing that in April of last year, is how it's different.

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gargarplex
Why don't they just have remote control trucks (with really good feeds of
sound/video/vibrations/etc) and outsource the driving to people in a low cost
of living area? Imagining how drones are piloted in offices in innocuous
shopping malls.

~~~
stevenwoo
Latency and internet up time. Just from playing online multiplayer video games
with people in the same city, there can be issues with this making video games
unplayable for short periods.

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.

~~~
gargarplex
Cool, that's what I figured, but I'm not entirely done with this line of
thinking yet...

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?

~~~
vuln
UAVs using Beyond Line of Site (BLoS) have a delay of about 5 seconds.

~~~
gargarplex
Let's say there is an airport somewhere flat and with no trees, so let's
assume LOS (Line of Sight) conditions. We want to provide a courtesy bus
system, 24 hours a day, to drive around at speeds no more than 10mph. Shuffle
people around terminals, to rental car lots, to designated ridesharing
collection areas, etc.

Couldn't the buses be piloted remotely?

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sjg007
We should really have self driving trains by now.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I believe Disney is likely working on it for their monorails after they lost a
driver. But who knows the status and it was more of a rumor but it would not
surprise me given how much less friction their monorails theoretically have
compared to automated trains.

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mooneater
I would love to hear balanced comparison between the various driverless
systems. What are the key differentiators here?

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confiscate
I like the demo. I think it comes down to how many miles of totally un-manned
driving they can rack up and record. If that number gets big enough, it's a
real win in terms of demonstrating viability.

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popol1991
AFAIK, TuSimple ([http://www.tusimple.com/index-
en.html](http://www.tusimple.com/index-en.html)) is much more mature on
autonomous trucks. At least they have completed more road test. Last July,
"TuSimple completed a 170-mile public road test from San Diego, California to
Yuma, Arizona using its Level 4 system."

~~~
stefan8r
TuSimple has definitely been doing some great stuff. We did a similar test
(w/freight) for the first time in January 2017...have have been doing that a
lot over the last 15 months

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cvaidya1986
Congratulations! Best of luck on continued progress.

