Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of autonomous vehicle company Aurora, explains what motivated his early work on DARPA autonomous driving challenges for military logistics.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urmson: Anyone driving a commercial truck today can still retire as one
“Now, my expectation is that if you're driving a truck today and you would like to retire as a truck driver, you're going to be able to. The shortage is that dire and the opportunity to kind of grow the freight market is, is real. And so I expect that, again, y…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Aurora expects fully driverless freight operations by late 2024 starting in Texas
“And so, yes, our expectation is by the end of next year, there will be no human. Yeah. And, you know, the way we're going to launch this is initially it'll be on one lane, Which is what you call kind of a trucking route, and that'll be between Dallas and Houst…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2033
Urmson predicts tens of percent of U.S. trucking becomes autonomous by 2033
“I think that's probably high for 10 years from now, but it's gonna be tens of percent is my expectation in, in a decade.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Aurora's proprietary First Light LiDAR measures vehicle velocity instantly
“One of the core technologies we have at the company is we call it First Light, which is the special LiDAR technology. So LiDAR is using light like radar, and it allows us to see farther than other people can and see how fast things are moving instantly.”
Insight
Academic robotics values one-off video demos over repeatable operational reliability
“Unlike most academic work where, you know, the idea is to kind of have the concept and you get the robot to do the thing once and you shoot the video and then it doesn't matter if it ever does it again or if it ever did it before, you've kind of made the point…”
Assertion Supported
The 2005 DARPA Challenge united the first modern self-driving tech stack
“I think this was the first time where you saw the whole conglomeration of what is now a self-driving vehicle. We had LIDAR radar camera, we had machine learning, we had high definition maps all this stuff that is now making vehicles kind of come together in a …”