We all make poor life choices
take these two guys for example
They're the founders of a self driving car company called Zoox
and they've decided it makes sense to try and compete against this
Waymo the Google self driving car project, Cruise Automation, Daimler, Baidu, Uber, and Lyft
But Zoox is different. its rivals are adding self driving technology to existing cars
Meanwhile Zoox is making a new type of vehicle
for the self driving age
basically Zoox is making a robot
and its early incarnation. Looks like the love child of the Matrix, Mad Max, and Transformers franchises
This is Tim Kentley-Klay
He hails from Australia and Down Under he was a well-known designer and ad guy
One day he had an epiphany. A vision of the future full of robotic vehicles and came here to build them
I sort of saw the future of how the whole system could work
I said ok I need to find a brilliant computer scientist
so that led me on a journey for six months actually where I ended up finding Jesse
That brilliant computer scientist is Dr. Jesse Levinson
A Stanford grad who was sought after by none other than Google itself
I actually visited a Google X in 2013 to come and speak on my vision for autonomy
In talking a fellow he there's one guy and he's really good and we can't get him
that was my signal to go and get him
a lot of your colleagues have run off to companies like Google or or Uber to retrofit their cars
What drew you to this particular task
and this approach
I've been working on some driving cars since 2005 and
it's pretty clear even back then that there's going to be one of the more transformative technologies for society
It wasn't enough to just solve the technology
You need a product and you need a business that makes sense
And I hadn't seen that in any other company until I met Tim and he shared his high level vision
For what Zoox could be
And that vision is a system of completely autonomous robotic vehicles
that can be summoned just like a Lyft, or dare I saw it, an Uber
We have a very clear vision at Zoox
which is that AI and mobility will take us out of the age of the automobile
and into the next mobility age which for us is robotics autonomous transportation
Tim and Jesse take me to the Alameda Naval Air Station
where I'm about to get a test drive and see how a Zooks robot handles
these are very unique vehicles. They're designed in a way that would only make sense
if they're going to be fully autonomous
The power trains are designed for full autonomy they are fully redundant and they have joule high voltage
batteries they have joule low voltage architectures
you can see that rigged with computer sensors. They can drive without any human intervention
This is VH4. This is VH5
You want to go for a ride?. Yeah I do. All right. Jump in
Zoox has placed cones on the tarmac. The robot is going to drive out and try to dodge them
And I get to do the whole test sitting backwards because Tim thought it would be funny
time to meet my robot maker
and with one swift keystroke I give complete control of my life over to an ai
That really doesn't get old.
It's like being at a ride at Disney.
These AI robots crank through the course at forty five miles per hour.
And the VH5 is set to rip through it at a delightful seventy five miles per hour
We can choose all wheel steering, two wheel steering, crab steering,
dual Motors
and then we have direction
I like the crab Steering.
Zoox got its start here in this abandoned firehouse back in 2015 with only six employees
They've since raised an astonishing eight hundred million dollars
and have expanded their operations into a one stop robot making shop
With the help of 400 employees.
Zoox now on their way to turning these prototypes into full fledged vehicles by 2020
For the moment though Zoox does most of its software testing in these
Modified versions of Toyota Highlander's which have the decided advantage of being street legal.
We’re actually going to get you to drive autonomously from this facility to our new headquarters in Foster City
And then Jesse is going to jump in and you can travel to downtown San Francisco
We don't know any company in the world that is driving that multi-dimensional degree of difficulty
from urban to freeway to dense downtown
So that's a that's a bicycle?
That was a cyclist yeah and that’s the car behind us
Is something like the speed limit, does that get taken by the cameras seeing the signs
or is that something that has to get entered in as you map the world?
If there's a sign that’s been vandalized or it’s missing, or you know, it’s got growth on it
The vehicle wouldn't know what the speed limit is and that could cause an incident right
or a fine
So speed limits are really well understood on the road networks. So we put that in as a primer on the map
Ok
So coming up right here we have to do a left turn yield
So you got to see this other car
Yes so were we would be concerned about this car that’s coming towards us from a prediction level
So we just want to make sure that they do the right thing
And now we’re yielding so if you look on this screen see this yellow here
That means we're yielding for that vehicle
Ok
And now we're off
We’re about to drive onto the freeway so this will be interesting
you can see there’s quite a bit of traffic on our left
and the vehicles indicating at the moment
it's going to break a little bit harder because we've got this vehicle right on our 6
and we're running out of runway. And now we merge in.
So that would have been a hard situation even for a human driver.
We needed to merge and that person on the left was not letting us in
We tried to go in front. They stayed with us and then we had to break,
let them go past, and then we pulled in. That was, that was all autonomous
and you could see how smooth that was
Good robot
So one of the hardest things to do with autonomous driving is actually prediction
because you not only need to understand whats the state of the world is,
you have to say well what's the state of the world in the near future
If I do this what will that person do.
And so that creates very quickly a large search tree and if the vehicle is going to drive with good performance
you need to be able to predict well what the state of the world is in the near future
Here’s our new headquarters
20 minutes suburban driving, freeways merging, 100 percent autonomous
That was incredible
That was amazing
Alright guy, let’s go two for two.
No pressure
Whats’ like in each box it looks like there’s like a Y an L
Yeah there's a V an R and an L. So V means vision, R means radar, and L means LIDAR
So we use cameras. We use radar and we use LIDAR
Cameras are really good at seeing what things are
Radar is really good at seeing where things are in terms of how far away they are
And then LIDAR is really good at telling you where things are in 3-D
at pretty high resolution and pretty high accuracy
And so what we do is we fuse those three sensors together in real time
to form one coherent view of the world which is actually what you're looking at on the screen
Definitely crowded
I mean that must make it harder
Oh yeah it's a lot to keep track of
We have made it autonomously to San Francisco
As far as the public knows Zoox along with Waymo, and GM cruise,
are the only companies capable of doing this kind of drive
and this is the first time they’ve ever shown the cars in action to the public
Is it madness to take on many of the world's leading automotive and tech companies at the same time?
Yes, Of course it is
But I say go fourth Tim and Jessie. We all await our lux robotic ride share of the future