
U.S. Army, Uber sign research agreement - hapnin
https://www.army.mil/article/204882/us_army_uber_sign_research_agreement
======
jadedhacker
Interesting, military only gave ~$1M for such an ambitious project while Uber
is burning billions a year and could easily afford this.

My speculation is that this partnership is first and foremost an attempt to
provide Uber with a patina of respectability for this attempt and access to
military technical expertise. Uber just crashed and burned on self driving,
something it desperately needs to quench its towering money fires. Uber's
investors know that. Therefore, Uber needs to constantly appear to be
"innovating" in flashy ways to keep its investors at bay with seductive
promises of even greater riches.

This, even if the entire idea of flying cars driven by normal humans is insane
or worse, piloted by a company known for breaking rules (now in Aviation of
all things!) and have the dubious honor of being the first to kill a woman
with self-driving AI.

It helps to have connections to get these contracts yo. And of course, yet
another major American company cooperating with defense. Military-industrial
complex indeed. Every peaceful venture must be tied to the killing machine.
All the cool kids are, like Google and its TF support for drone
assassinations.

EDIT: added technical expertise to 2nd paragraph

~~~
Donald
This is a cooperative research and development agreement ("CRADA"), which is
generally a technology sharing vehicle. Money flows from the non-federal party
to the federal party on these agreements. Looks like ARL is matching the
funds, so Uber is putting $500k on the CRADA and ARL will reciprocate with
$500k in sole-source funding on an actual contracting vehicle. I'd be
surprised if the $500k paid for anything more than a proof of concept
demonstration on both sides.

~~~
killjoywashere
I have done multiple CRADAs and frankly believe they are the most
underutilized tool in the tech industry, they're the intellectual equivalent
of buying mining rights for $5/acre.

The government has staggeringly interesting problems that need solving and
sole access to some very interesting data, which they will happily share as
long as you bring your own pick-axe and shovel.

Go to federallabs.org and start shopping. It's not Amazon, you'll have to
actually go to some of these places and meet the custodians of the problems
and data, but it's worth it.

I've said Google is where the future falls from the sky like rain. These labs
are like the Mississippi River basin, all the water goes here.

The key is prospecting. You want to look around, get a good idea of how big a
particular reserve is, and go for something big. You may have to start small,
but keep your eye on the prize and work up a glide slope. You can get there.
The law was created so you can get there.

Key programs

* Veterans Affairs

* DoD: too many labs to name, coordinated by each service, ONR, AFRL, and ARL

* NOAA

* DoE

* DoI

* DHS

Really, get a look at the Death and Taxes Poster if you want to shop by
category. But the labs are the shelves lined with product you need to shop
through.

[https://www.timeplots.com/products/death-and-
taxes-2016](https://www.timeplots.com/products/death-and-taxes-2016)

~~~
rsp1984
This sounds super interesting but my knowledge in this area is too limited to
fully get what you're saying.

 _they 're the intellectual equivalent of buying mining rights for $5/acre ...
The key is prospecting. You want to look around, get a good idea of how big a
particular reserve is, and go for something big._

Could you elaborate on this a little or give an example?

As far as I understand CRADA is "cooperative R&D", so each side contributes to
the R&D of some subject. Wikipedia says

"Private corporations participating in a CRADA are allowed to file for patent,
and they retain patent rights on inventions developed by the CRADA. The
government gets a license to the patents"

So if the govt already gets a license to the patents, and the tech has been
developed with defense purposes in mind, how am I going to profit as a private
company?

~~~
killjoywashere
> So if the govt already gets a license to the patents, and the tech has been
> developed with defense purposes in mind, how am I going to profit as a
> private company?

Let's break that down a bit...

So the government has patent rights. They'd have to exercise them, which
requires product development. Are you aware of the government selling many
widgets to citizens? They sell road maintenance, insurance, and security
services. But they don't really sell citizens "things".

Companies are savvy. If the government approached you and said "we have this
patented tech, we want you to use it in this widget", now that you know about
CRADAs, wouldn't you be a bit worried about a lawsuit from the other people
who have rights on that patent?

Further, without commercialization, the government has rights on that one
thing. They don't have rights on version 2, or even version 1.1.

You mention defense. Why? Are you in the defense business? Dept of
Transportation might be better for self-driving cars. DoE or NIST might be
better high tech partners. USDA or FDA if your in the food space. Etc.

~~~
rsp1984
Ok, I get the patent part. But what I was mostly interested in is how you see
CRADAs help companies make money.

To me CRADAs just sound like a vehicle to share R&D costs, which, in most
companies, aren't dominating the budget. So they can be a nice help but no
game-changer.

However you mentioned "mining rights" and "going for something big", so it
sounded like there's another way to look at this, which I was interested to
hear about.

------
willart4food
I can see Uber doing R&D in autonomous cars, I see that an extension - and the
next logical steps - for transportation as we know it.

But, when I read:

"The joint work statement focuses on research to create the first usable
stacked co-rotating rotors or propellers; this is a concept for having two
rotor systems placed on top of each other and rotating in the same direction."

I scratch my head: where is Uber's domain expertise in this?

~~~
jonknee
It's a $500,000 dollar research grant, I assume the military gives out a _lot_
of these and almost none make press releases. Uber has talked about flying
cars before, so that's the experience answer.

~~~
calcifer
I also talked about flying cars before, how is that "experience"?

~~~
jonknee
Do you have people on staff working on building flying cars? If so you too can
probably match the government for $500,000 and research the topic.

~~~
calcifer
> Do you have people on staff working on building flying cars?

Does Uber? They sure talk about things a lot and yet, there is very little -
if any - proof of them doing actual work on "flying cars".

I'm inclined to agree with other comments that this is mostly a PR stunt for
Uber.

~~~
malandrew
UberElevate Summit Videos:

Part 1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvQuk0_xjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvQuk0_xjs)

Part 2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uELtDHITGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uELtDHITGo)

You can see that they do have people actually working on various important
aspects of urban aviation.

------
Bobbleoxs
Isn't it ironic whilst Google's engineers are mass protesting against military
contracts, Uber already signed a whole bunch without any moral dilemma
whatsover. Tells a lot about the company ethics there.

On a separate note, could someone enlighten how stacked co-rotoring (moving
towards the same direction) may make the aircraft silent and not noisier?

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
> "Google's engineers are mass protesting"

~12 Google employees resigned. Out of ~4,000 signers to the petition. Out of
~74,000 total employees. A drop in the bucket. Clearly the vast majority of
google employees don't care, rationalize away, or excuse the fact that they
work for the military industrial complex.

~~~
epanchin
5.6% of staff signed a petition and 1.6% resigned.

In comparison, the largest petition in the US was 4.6 million signatures, a
mere 1.8% of the working age population.

~~~
doktrin
>> ~12 Google employees resigned. Out of ~4,000 signers to the petition. Out
of ~74,000 total employees.

> 5.6% of staff signed a petition and 1.6% resigned.

1.6% would be almost 12,000, not 12. I'm not familiar with this case but a
quick search corroborated that it was a dozen employees that walked out.

~~~
nightcracker
1.6% of 74000 is approx 1200, not 12000.

~~~
doktrin
Actually it's 120

~~~
Fnoord
74000 * 1,6 / 100 = 1184

------
stephenr
So the army saw how Uber’s driverless cars handle pedestrians crossing a road
and said “shut up and take my money”?

~~~
rdtsc
They probably didn't even think or care about it. I bet someone on the board
reached for some connections and it just happened to be the military. A lot of
that stuff happens behind the scenes even though officially the is a bid and
proposal process.

------
john_moscow
>Uber and the Army's research lab expect to spend a combined total of $1
million in funding for this research; this funding will be divided equally
between each party.

That's about 8 person-years in salary. Given Uber's scale that doesn't make
any sense.

~~~
John_KZ
Could it be a front for some other kind of deal? It sounds a bit paranoid but
if it's classified they wouldn't tell us anyway.

~~~
criticalpotato
Most probably from government side this is purely a bold "In case these guys
manage to do it we don't want the tech to fall to hands of <insert random
country> so let's get contract on their R&D now and keep eye on it. If they
succeed we'll push for exclusivity and if they fail, well it's a million, who
cares. We're already some 20 trillion in debt so pish posh."

~~~
weaksauce
It was a 500k match not 1 million.

------
criticalpotato
Or would it be time to give up on Uber and finally admit that they're neither
a technology company nor anything else "groundbreaking" that Valley thinks
they are.

"Technology" for the company has been coming up with a mobile app to connect
drivers and potential customers - something hardly groundbreaking. Probably
the most groundbreaking technological thing coming from these guys has been
the multiple evasion software etc which at the end of the day are not only
just sketchy to begin with but also not really anything worth their company
valuation, even on the defense contracting etc where such applications could
become worth something if you have slick enough lobbying/sales people.

And while their efforts to "disrupt" the taxi economy have been "great" in all
honesty they've only created room for their competition to benefit on this -
Uber has simply managed to take a business (taxis) and run it to chaos while
what would've been the logical step was to run a similar application by the
taxi companies for ride hailing.

The US defense collaboration we can only speculate on but presumably this is
either government wanting to get their hands on the Uber spying software or
taking their bet that if these dimwits ever come up with anything
technological they can always call for it - why spend billions upon billions
on R&D when you can get a bunch of small contracts for which you can negotiate
exclusive rights for upcoming R&D by the companies.

My question simply is - why do you care of anything Uber anymore? After
everything this company has proven to be from the law enforcement evasion to
sexual harassment scandals and borderline impossible "innovations" (like
seriously, who seriously thought these guys can figure out the self-driving
cars etc when the 2 of the biggest technology corporations with virtually
unlimited experience, know-how, funding and partnerships haven't done so
yet?).

At best this would be proper honest R&D but in my honest opinion there's no
way Uber is that far with the tech and no way US Army is doing R&D for civil
purposes, you take into account the miniscule contract value etc and it's
rather clear that this is either publicity stunt by Uber to save their sinking
ship or direct tech takeover from government. In either case there's hardly
anything news worthy and even less anything worth of spending time - let is
sink and someone will build a better, functioning ship to take people across
the busy streets of New York in some vehicle whether it's flying or on the
ground.

~~~
dan-0
> "Technology" for the company has been coming up with a mobile app to connect
> drivers and potential customers - something hardly groundbreaking.

> And while their efforts to "disrupt" the taxi economy have been "great" in
> all honesty they've only created room for their competition to benefit on
> this - Uber has simply managed to take a business (taxis) and run it to
> chaos while what would've been the logical step was to run a similar
> application by the taxi companies for ride hailing.

These two statements are contradictory.

While I'm not a fan of many things Uber does, this was something that was
groundbreaking at the time, less than 10 years ago. If you lived in a big city
before Uber/Lyft/etc you have fond memories of getting ripped off and taken
advantage of, taking bad routes, dangerously manuvering through traffic, and
either having to walk to a main thoroughfare or wait 30 minutes for the taxi
that was supposed to be dispatched in 10 when you called for one. And good
luck having anything come out of a complaint to the city over violations of
passenger rights laws.

Now, regardless of what the complaints are against Uber, you can get a way
more affordable ride, at a fixed price, on a mapped route, whose livelihood
actually depends on how good they are (ratings), and know when/where your ride
is almost as soon as you order it.

Even now where you'd expect taxi companies to take a stance to provide better
services, they're devoting more resources to lobbying local government to
control "ride share" companies. Mean while, all they'd have to do is provide a
rating system, fixed prices over mapped routes, and an app to order a taxi and
I'd be happy. Just enforcing that they use some direction service that can
route around traffic would probably be enough for me. Instead, it seems they
prey on locations full of non city tourist (like airports, train station, and
attractions) that don't know any better.

Uber has undoubtedly done bad things, but to say they aren't a technology
company and that what they did (and still are doing) isn't groundbreaking is
wrong.

~~~
criticalpotato
Not to get nitpicky here but the statements are not in contradiction - one is
stating what was the "technological breakthrough" of Uber and another is
stating that their disruption of the industry they wanted to affect hasn't
really gone their (or anyone else's) way. I'm not really sure if that what
they created in the industry (taxis) and what their basically core and
original product is (app which connects drivers and customers) are in
contradiction here.

Good comparisons imo in regards to the disruption if that bothers here would
be something like PayPal or even AirBnB which disrupted the industries they
work within, and did it in a way that created positive progress and actually
both companies are still on route to making that disruption of old wasteful
industries better - Uber didn't do this and has long given up on anything
except trying to burn as much money as possible (just a personal opinion).

Yes Uber (and Lyft etc) did a disruption in what you mentioned and I fully
agree with your points on the issues with taxi traffic previously (and to some
extent still, even with these lovely ride sharing companies). However one has
to simply wonder if all that would've been possible with just providing
product for taxi companies (and individuals) offering the benefits of this
disruption - mapped rides with feedback system and pre-determined rates. Also
what has to be taken into account here is that some of these features already
existed within the industry, while maybe not in US they still existed.

The ride thing, I agree here albeit Uber has been, and still is the most
expensive option (in a lot of countries it's even more expensive than those
taxis taking the bad routes etc). Mapped routes (aka GPS) isn't Uber invention
btw, it's called navigation and has been there since 1995. The rating system
works (technically) and gives an incentive for the drivers which I think think
all can agree is a good thing. Then again what if someone just came up with
app that provides feedback system and price calculations based on the length
of the trip and variables in traffic and offered that to the taxi companies
and individuals (and why not for everyone with a smart phone), would that cost
2,8 billion as loss annually. Dunno.

The taxi companies are taking a bad fight here admittedly and in no way I
think either party's lobbying efforts are really making any progress here with
traditional business trying to fight for the "fossils & fuels" so to say and
the new players trying to not just enhance but break the existing legal
regulations etc. Either party really isn't looking to create anything new nor
improve, but more so at the end just fighting for the money, and well guess
it's business but I agree here that the traditional taxis really aren't
helping their case either.

To say Uber isn't a technology company is a thin red line imo, it's not a
technology company as Google nor Stripe, they aren't really doing
technological innovations nor products but more so sociological and business
related disruptions. Their app might've been the first there and they might've
jumped on every single branch of technology from aerospace to AI and food
delivery. What I mean with this is that their innovations within the
technology space have been rather miniscule (in comparison to other companies
that actually work with technology, or Dominos for that matter of working with
food delivery and through that in hospitality) when taken into comparison with
the massive impact they seem to have in the industry. Or would you consider
saying that naming a product which essentially is a standard equipment in
cars, albeit it's fancy name of UberKIDS, a child safety seat (and not a fancy
high-tech one, just having that in a car) is a technological breakthrough or,
well anything technological? I don't know, just tossing my 5 cents in the
pool.

------
Tepix
Uber misses no opportunity not to like them.

------
wishart_washy
And when the agreement completes they'll each gain +200 science.

------
txsh
It’s good that the US isn’t at war in Iraq any more. Uber’s surge pricing
would bankrupt them.

------
pjc50
Guessing this refers to
[http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8640985.html](http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8640985.html)
: multiple co-axial rotors spinning in the same direction sounds a bit odd but
evidently does something clever with wakes to increase lift / reduce noise.

~~~
zeusk
Well, jet engines are internally co-axial rotors spinning in the same
direction (except for some with contra rotating HP and LP).

~~~
votingprawn
That comparison only really holds if you ignore the stators, which the rotors
are reacting against.

------
shanghaiaway
Good reason for legislators to kick Uber out of their country.

~~~
fiiv
I think this is definitely true. There are many countries in the world that
are looking for an excuse to turn public opinion against Uber, and having the
US Army as a partner is definitely a good way to do that.

~~~
frockington
And then they can also scrap all of the planes, space programs, tor networks,
telephones and just about every other modern technology that the US Military
has in someway funded

~~~
fiiv
The way this tends to work is not rational, it's reactionary and often
punitive. It doesn't matter if product X also was partially funded by US Army,
if regulators don't like Uber, this is yet another thing to create that
argument with.

------
sschueller
Will Uber aquire the necessary licenses from the FAA to fly these things or
will they also ignore those because they want to 'disrupt' the industry?
Theses things better be safe before they get used.

I for one don't want one if these things crashing on my house.

~~~
sgillen
They sort of have to right? If they don’t its going to be obvious and the
government should come down on them.

I guess the world isn’t perfect but we at least have regulation for things we
put in the air that we won’t for self driving cars or ride sharing etc.

------
dmix
You can see a picture of the "stacked co-rotating rotors" on their partners
website: [http://www.launchpnt.com/](http://www.launchpnt.com/)

------
JepZ
Two guesses:

\- Uber has ambitions to build a Volocopter [1] alternative

\- Uber wants to become an US Army contractor (probably to utilize their AI
technology for drones or self driving supply trucks/tanks)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODIvUmH6cs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODIvUmH6cs)

------
omginternets
>To date, stacked co-rotating rotors have not been deployed in existing flying
craft.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50)

What am I missing?

~~~
ynniv
Existing systems are contra-rotating, this research is co-rotating.

------
FriedPickles
If both rotors spin the same direction, what keeps the aircraft body from
rotating the other direction? Is there a tail rotor?

~~~
criticalpotato
Good questions, even better question would be how did we figure out quantum
theory etc but couldn't figure that twice the vertical lift from 2 rotors is
more than lift single rotor? How's this something credited to Uber? Dunno.

~~~
rando444
Tandem rotors have been around for almost a century.

What they're doing here is stacking rotors on top of each other, not for lift,
but apparently because it's quieter and allows for 'better performance' ..
whatever that means.

------
SlowRobotAhead
I find it interesting that Uber wants to do everything except find people
rides.

I’ll continue using Lyft. Uber is going to either get lucky with something and
also be the Uber Of That or they’re going to burn hard by forgetting what it
is they are supposed to be doing.

------
dkdinesh749
Wow....salute to this

------
discordance
"US Army hoping to learn from Uber's UAV killing machines"

~~~
mtgx
It's called the Uber CrowdControl™ technology. It could prove useful in enemy
territory when surrounded by hostile forces.

~~~
philipwhiuk
If not, they activate Surge.

------
RunningRabbit
It's about time i can order a black M1 Abrams to get me to the club in style!

------
trumped
Are they going to equip all Uber cars with a standard charge of explosive in
case one of their customer need to disapear?

------
gaius
I wonder if any Uber staff will resign in protest. I wonder if customers and
drivers in countries not entire aligned with US imperialism will vote with
their feet too.

~~~
carboy0808
US imperialism? Go away troll.

~~~
jadedhacker
Afghanistan. Iraq. Central America. Indonesia. Korea. Vietnam. We can do this
for a while and that's just the overt military interventions not counting
colonization by American business and capitalist ideology.

------
matt4077
One would think Uber has enough problems recruiting and retaining talented
people, what with "go fast and break things (people)".

Now it's not just casual misogyny and user surveillance. Your work may
actually kill people when used as intended.

~~~
golergka
> Your work may actually kill people when used as intended.

Are you intentionally being completely oblivious to the fact that many people
believe this consequence to be a good thing for them and humanity as a whole?
I don't want to get into the debate about whether this belief is true or not;
I'm just curious as to why HN commenters so often pretend that people with
different political beliefs don't exist at all, or are only pretending to have
these beliefs out of some other, hidden, true reasons.

Even if you don't agree with some political stance, it's just strange to
convince yourself that nobody sincerely believes it.

~~~
aninhumer
I don't think that's a fair criticism here.

The parent didn't say "Don't you know this will kill people!?" they said "This
will kill people".

~~~
golergka
It also implied that this fact carries a certain value judgement, ignoring the
reality that said value judgement may just as well be completely the opposite.

