Urmson and MIT Move On

Chris Ursom has left Google and he either does not know or has decided not to announce where he is going. Others have left, but Urmson has been the public face of the Google car project in the media and before government agencies. He had seemed to completely identify with the project. I can't imagine he will abandon the driverless world or that no other AV player will hire him.

Forget Google, drive your own

Test out your own driverless contraption now without being part of a tech company or auto company team. A driverless test track opens to normal people, but only on limited days in a roaming series of continent-hopping events. Applications seem to be necessary; you can't just show up. And there's a fee. So far, the events, well into 2017, will take place in the UK and in Europe. I feel that post-Brexit we can be honest and say the UK and Europe are different continents.

Kendall Square challenges Silicon Valley

A partnership between MIT and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency for innovation within the Department of Defense (the Pentagon for labeling purposes on this blog) is bearing fruit with the creation of a lidar chip that is super tiny and super thin and - best yet - possibly super cheap at $10, assuming mass production in the future. The chip is undergoing further adaptions to increase its power and accuracy.  

Honestly, I do not understand the technical details, but I do comprehend that this technology could make driverless technology safer and cheaper, therefore closer to being possible for mass production and use.

Israeli startup also goes for less expensive LIDAR

Not as cheap as the $10 goal, but Innoviz, an Israeli startup with millions in funding (okay, not unusual, but it's $9 million) also sees the holy grail of budget-happy LIDAR, though with an unspecified under-$100 price tag. This from the same Geektime article linked above. ccc

Innoviz is building LiDAR sensing systems, which are often used by satellites to measure distance and terrain. What Innoviz and some other companies are betting on is not only the growth of the autonomous vehicle market, but the inevitable reliance of such systems on LiDAR. Their main product, High Definition Solid State LiDAR (HD-SSL), won’t debut until December. They are claiming it will have a wider field of view than the current standard, “higher resolution in both axis and long range sensing,” and be cheaper at a cost coming in under $100.