Why is Ford investing $1 billion over five years in a Pittsburgh
startup called Argo AI? It’s looking to gain an edge in self-driving car
technology in the four-year countdown to 2021. That’s when Ford has
said it will be shipping cars with autonomous driving. Several other
automakers said in 2016 they’d have self-driving cars within five years,
too.
Ford CEO Mark Fields said, “With Argo AI’s agility and
Ford’s scale, we’re combining the benefits of a technology startup with
the experience and discipline we have at Ford.” Ford will continue work
on the self-driving vehicle platform, including sensors, while Argo AI
will build the virtual driver system.
Ford
(the guys with suitjackets, CEO Mark Fields, development chief Raj
Nair) ponied up $1 billion to a pair of Carnegie Mellon alums who
founded Argo AI: COO Peter Rander, ex of Uber, and Bryan Salesky, ex of
Google.
Here’s the deal
Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh is one of the world leaders in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. Grads and professors have spun off or started several autonomous driving startups, including Ottomatika which
has since been purchased by Delphi, and now Argo AI. One of Uber’s
autonomous driving test fleets is in Pittsburgh because of the CMU
connection.
As for Argo AI, the startup reunites CMU grads from its
National Robotics Engineering Center who’ve been working on other
self-drive projects. Chief operating officer Peter Rander was a leader
of the Uber autonomous car program. CEO Bryan Salesky had a similar role
with Waymo, Google / Alphabet’s self-driving program. Argo AI plans to
ramp up to 200 employees by year’s end.
Ford will be the majority stakeholder in Argo and some of Ford’s
engineers may shift to Argo. As Ford notes, “Through their equity
participation, Argo AI employees will share in the startup’s growth,”
which is a more polite way of saying “possibly get rich beyond their
wildest dreams.”
SAE International J3106 autonomous driving levels
AI to resolve the trickier issues of self-driving
Some rules of self-driving are cut-and-dry: Stay in the middle of the
lane. Maintain X-distance from the car behind you. Stop and wait
Y-seconds for pedestrians on the sidewalk to see if they’ll cross or
not. Don’t change lanes if other cars are coming up in the adjacent
lanes.
Other situations require higher-level reasoning, and that’s
where AI comes in: Determining the safer alternative when merging onto
the crowded interstate. Deciding to enter a traffic circle now or wait
for a bigger opening. Dealing with a right-lane closure or blocked lane
that isn’t in the car’s knowledge base (
Audi and Nvidia showed an example of this at CES 2017).
It’s this level of intelligence that Ford needs if it is to
have a car capable of SAE Level 4 autonomous driving. That’s one level
below the top; in Level 5, cars won’t even need steering wheels. With
both Levels 4 and 5, the system (the car and its self-driving software),
are in charge of steering, acceleration, and braking; monitoring the
driving environment; and being the fallback (not the human) for tricky
or unanticipated situations. The one difference is full automation
(Level 5) works in every driving mode.
There is talk of jumping from Level 2, where some cars are
today — multiple driver assist features working to together, such as
adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, and blind spot
detection — straight to Level 4. The challenge is that drivers in Level 3
cars would have to be ready to take over at any moment. As a practical
matter, some will have stopped paying attention, perhaps even nodded
off. That’s not good enough if the car suddenly funds itself in a curvy
construction zone, where every lane shifts suddenly and the lanes are 10
not 12 feet wide, or in a blocked-lane situation.
The race to ship self-driving cars
While Ford kicks a billion dollars, Argo AI has the right to
sell its intellectual property to other automakers and suppliers. With
IPO visions dancing about, it may be the startups are hungrier to get
autonomous driving software into cars for testing and then customer
delivery in 4-5 years.
Ford is not alone. General Motors acquired Cruise, another startup using artificial intelligence for
autonomous driving.
Also, the Tier 1 (biggest) automotive suppliers are rolling their own
self-driving, software-plus-hardware solutions, sometimes by buying
other startups. Delphi, as mentioned, has Ottomatika.
Then there’s Apple and Google. Apple appears to have scaled back its autonomous car project,
possibly to be a major supplier of parts of the autonomous car. But
it’s found the actual manufacturing part, where automakers have had a
100-year head start, is tough to master. When several European
automakers said they wouldn’t build cars for Apple (both sides wanted
the star billing), Apple downsized its ambitions. Reportedly. Apple
still does a good job keeping its future plans secret.
Google’s self-drive project, now called Waymo, continues to move
forward. Google also reported that disengagements, meaning when the
driver decides he or she needs to take over, fell from 0.8 per 1,000
miles driver to 0.2, or once every 5,000 miles.
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