Autonomous Vehicle Lab

The Future Mobility Network - Some excellent work from Holland.

http://www.auvsi.org/ - Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International - Expensive entry fee for a frightening mix of peaceful and weaponized AVs.

Level Five Jobs - Job board for autonomous vehicle technology.

A decent list.

http://www.automatedvehiclessymposium.org/home (San Francisco)

https://autonomousvehicles.iqpc.com/ (Detroit)

http://www.autonomousvehicletechnologyworldexpo.com/en/ (Stuttgart)

Information about the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium which did tests in 1997 on I-15 in San Diego. Good historical information about such projects is summarized here. The Automated Highway System (AHS) System Objectives And Characteristics document may be from 1995, but it is still the best thinking I’ve seen for the realistic future of autonomous vehicles and is an excellent resource.

A decent short history of autonomous vehicles.

/r/SelfDrivingCars - Have some trolly problems with your trolley problems!

Brad Templeton - Although I disagree with Brad about some of the fundamentals, he’s still the most intelligent and well informed pundit on the topic of self-driving cars.

Unmanned Systems Technology Magazine.

driverless.global - Site aiming for a comprehensive coverage of involved players.

Apeless Carriage - Lars Christian.

Self-Drivings

Engios covers driverless-cars with a verbose but sometimes interesting website.

Driverless Future blog.

Driverless Transportation

Distill - Extremely high quality presentations about machine learning topics.

Sonnet - Like Keras but different. Handles weights sharing and dynamic tensors in RNNs better than Keras perhaps?

The Last Driver License Holder … is already born.

europilot - a simulation environment to interface Euro Truck Simulator for developing self-driving algorithms. Brilliant!

Apparently Microsoft researchers have an open simulator, Airsim, which may be suitable for AV testing.

www.truevision.ai/[Photorealistic Simulation For Self-Driving Cars]

FutureCar

Foretellix has a very good blog with interesting perspectives on simulation and validation.

SnakeOil Exhibition Races - My autonomous cars in action.

An interesting old video showing the state of the art of autonomous vehicles in 1997, from San Diego.

Lex gives a good overview of the state of the art of autonomous vehicles in 2019. Here’s an even better one where Lex interviews Geohot — really one of the most important discussions about autonomous vehicles.

NOVA - The Great Robot Race PBS TV documentary.

Amnon Shashua of Mobileye gives a brilliant talk at MIT in March 2017 on the state of the art of autonomous vehicles.

Talk by Matt Zeiler with a great summary of CNN + discussion of visualizing the process.

Chris Urmson talks to CMU 2017-04-20

AVs handling intersections in interesting ways. Papers from the lab of Peter Stone.

The Nut Behind The Wheel. Or, cars don’t kill people; people kill people.

Udacity - Self-Driving Car Engineer NanoDegree Program

Udacity - Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree Program

Bosch Automated Mobility Academy

http://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu/ Very interesting course from MIT.

Andrej Karpathy - Stanford professor and smart guy.

Nvidia - paper on using CNNs to train cars

Duckietown - An adorable project from MIT where cute small AVs navigate through a model town of ducks.

MIT 6.S094: Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars

OpenCV docs recommended by course: http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/

Keras docs recommended by course:

The High Cost Of Free Parking - My review of Donald Shoup’s extremely important book. The title really says it all.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. My review.

Probabilistic Robotics by Sebastian Thrun, et al.

Bicycle Accident Reconstruction for the Forensic Engineer

Forensic Aspects of Driver Perception and Response

On-line book about NN

O’Reilly’s Learning OpenCV 3

O’Reilly’s Learning OpenCV

Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision by Hartley and Zisserman

Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision

Szeliski’s Computer Vision - free PDF.

Goodfellow, Bengio, & Courville’s free book - http://deeplearningbook.org/

Micael Neilsen’s free book - http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

Activation Functions

Kalman Filter

DARPA Grand Challenge 2005

Wikipedia History of Autonomous Cars

ADAS - Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Verification and validation - my favorite AV topic!

Interesting paper on visualizing neural network layers https://jacobgil.github.io/deeplearning/vehicle-steering-angle-visualizations

Nian’s list of Adversarial Net Papers https://github.com/zhangqianhui/AdversarialNetsPapers/blob/master/README.md

AWS has a toy car event.

Self Racing Cars

Roborace

Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competitions

Purdue

http://www.donkeycar.com/

Audi Autonomous Driving Cup - 1:8 Scale

DIY Robocars is a Bay Area meetup racing model AVs. And Donkey Car.

California DMV AV registrations and incident reports.

DOT Regs: http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/rdw/horizontal_alignment.htm For example, curve radius specs. http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/rdw/horizontal_alignment.htm#BGBHGEGC

NHTSA and their https://www.safercar.gov/ Also NHTSA Federal Automated Vehicles Policy

SAE levels — e.g. J3016_201609. (Try this to see what they actually are.) And of course XKCD.

EU report on AVs

American Vision for Safer Transportation through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies Act, aka AV START Act. Not to be outdone, the HR has their own Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution Act aka SELF DRIVE Act.

Patents:

Waymo just released a big set of AV data.

Oxford RobotCar Dataset contains sensor readings for 100 trips on a set route in all kinds of conditions.

German Traffic Sign Detection

The KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite (Road/Lane Detection Evaluation 2013)

Bosch Small Traffic Lights Dataset

UCSD LISA

UCSD Statistical Visual Computing Lab

The DOT has a report detailing exactly who crashes and why. This is from 2007 so their estimate of distracted drivers must be considered completely incorrect now. Still interesting.

XKCD - "Most people aren’t murderers."

Good report on sensor technologies and the companies involved. 2018-01-02

An interesting report from Waymo about how they design their autonomous cars. Although it is a clear and simple document, it is filled with interesting information.

Sciam tries to imagine the consequences of the complex interaction of autonomous cars and pedestrians. article

The Economist on the death of the internal combustion engine. A bit off topic, but a good summary of that related transition.

Articles about companies in autonomous vehicles from cbinsights: 1, 2, 3 (2016-06-09)

Nice collection of prognostications from the major auto companies about when AVs will be happening.

IEEE reviewing an article from 1969 about an AV scheme then. A reminder that just because people are excited about it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in the next 50 years.

Colorado DOT autonomous impact protection vehicle, a perfect use case and a perfect metaphor for the rest of driving if we’re honest.

Interesting new 3d camera technology research being done at Stanford and UCSD.

Rich people discuss an idea to turn some Washington I-5 into AV lanes.

XKCD - "…almost at the intersection…"

IEEE Spectrum article on bicycle/AV interaction.

TMP on umich’s Architectural Implications of Autonomous Driving

http://www.path.berkeley.edu/

International Journal of Computer Vision

ACM Transactions on Graphics

Machine Learning

IEEE Journal on Robotics and Automation

IEEE Robotics & Automation Society

Journal of Field Robotics

CVPR2017 Conference papers (vision)

Tesla ★ - Autopilot, Palo Alto, CA. Offices in Los Angeles too.

Audi - Remember Pikes Peak back in 2010? I do.

Daimler AG - Owns Mercedes ★. And maybe working with Freightliner on trucks.

Scania -

Volvo - Intellisafe. Trucks, SARTRE.

Iveco -

Ford ★ - Seems to not be afraid of Michigan weather. Interestingly just bought human-driver commuting shuttle service, Chariot.

GM - Owns Cruise, Sidecar. Partnered with Lyft. "SuperCruise" been around a while in the lab. The Economist reviews GM’s situation. Hiring!

Nissan - ★ Had that plan with the call center remote drivers. Some new stuff with DeNA. In some kind of weird alliance with Renault and Mitsubishi. The Economist explains.

Renault - EZ-GO concept car. See Nissan.

Mitsubishi - Diamond Safety. Uh huh. "Thinking of people at any time." Oh boy. xAUTO. Good luck guys. See Renault.

Honda ★ - rumors that they work with Waymo. Oh, and a motorcycle that doesn’t fall over!

Hyundai

PSA Groupe - Peugeot, Citroen. Doing something but hard to tell what exactly.

Tata Elxsi - Some work on parking, some work on security using AV sensors. Vague. Orange County and Irivne, CA.

Toyota - TRI ★ - Palo Alto, CA and Cambridge, MA. Late to the game. Sensibly bearish. Helping old people not kill people? Toyota Material Handling is definitely interested in autonomous forklifts.

Volkswagen ★ - VW Electronics Research Laboratory. One word: Stanley. Then there’s MOIA which seems vaguely related to AV but not really (despite The Economist promising a 2021 AV roll out. Another view.

BMW ★ - They have a Autonomous Driving Campus in Munich.

Yutong - Chinese self-driving bus.

McLaren - Nothing really. Rumors and innuendo. They are a Udacity.com/drive hiring partner FWIW.

Subaru ★ - "slower approach".

Fiat-Chrysler - some rumors here and there. Maybe partnering with BMW. I can also say that I have some first hand information that they are interested in expanding their expertise in this area.

John Deere Doing the most so far to promote the technology?

FarmWise.io - sensible looking unmanned ag equipment - San Francisco.

Case IH - Developing a tractor with no human cab. Great idea. Seems obvious to me for safety even if it’s RC and not autonomous. Could be CNH (Case New Holland) these days.

Komatsu - Probably the most real company in autonomous vehicles.

Built Robotics makes unmanned excavators (or makes excavators unmanned). It’s crazy this wasn’t happening ten years ago because it’s so obvious. But it is finally happening, despite this company being based in San Francisco.

CAT Autonomous Hauling

Liebherr - Swiss company makes mining haul trucks.

Rio Tinto mines are moving ahead sensibly with autonomous ore hauling trains. And in the counter-argument category, here’s a $200e6 USD accident of similar (same?) technology.

Buffalo Automation. Great stuff. Obviously the coolest company in the world!

My Beginners Guide To Underwater Drones.

Saildrone is very cool. The CEO rightly points to its future bankruptcy, "There is no money in the science market." Which is a shame.

Sea Machines in Boston.

Norwegian Kongsberg.

Volvo Penta is doing autonomous docking of yachts. A great example of making sensible minor changes to the environment (the marina) to make the problem much easier.

MUNIN - Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks, a research project.

The Microtransat Challenge - a transatlantic race for autonomous boats.

Udacity ★ - Yes, they have a car (named Carla) out on the roads!

Waymo ★ - Mountainview and AZ of course, and some testing in Lake Tahoe in the snow!

Uber ★ - Aka UATG. Famously near CMU too.

Lyft ★ - San Francisco.

Embark Trucks - very similar to Otto’s sensible business model. Also located in San Francisco.

Starsky Robotics - yet another autonomous truck company in San Francisco. Looks like they just went out of business in 2020. Interesting article at the link. Too bad since it sounds like they were on the right path.

comma.ai - George Hotz. Retrofitting regular street cars to be autonomous with, basically, phones. A good video introduction. (Now in San Diego.)

drive.ai ★ - "Building the Brain of Self-Driving Vehicles", Stanford, CA

Nvidia ★ - On board computing platforms (Drive PX-Series) and machine learning firepower.

MobilEye a.k.a. Intel. A brilliant talk by Amnon Shashua.

Intel ★ - Besides owning Mobileye they have their own CA testing registration. They are also the original patron of OpenCV.

GM Cruise ★ - Sighted in San Francisco.

Aurora ★ - Chris Urmson. "Secretive". Palo Alto and Pittsburgh. Friends with Byton.

Nauto - Palo Alto, CA

AImotive ★ - Mountain View, CA and Hungary

Veniam - V2V and V2X

Savari - V2V and V2X

TrustPoint - V2X (Canada)

http://robopgh.com/

NIO ★ - Maybe aka "NextEv USA, Inc." San Jose, Munich, London, Shanghai, and eight other locations

Didi Chuxing - Mountain View, Chinese Uber opens AV lab

BaiduUSA Autonomous Driving Unit ★ - Sunnyvale, CA

MIT - http://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu/join/

GM - https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/General-Motors-Jobs-E279_P2.htm

Hella Aglaia, Germany

voyage.auto - article - Spun off and partially owned by Udacity.

AutonomouStuff - supplies "components, engineering services and software that enable autonomy."

Wind River - Owned by Intel. Their logo more aptly just "wind"?

CivilMaps - SF

Peloton - The old SARTRE truck platooning idea, Silicon Valley style.

TeleNav ★ - wireless location-based services, GPS, automotive navigation solutions W

AutoX ★ - "AutoX’s disruptive camera-first AI brings self-driving cars out of the lab and into the real world."

Renovo ★ - "merges self-driving software, data analytics, and automotive-grade safety systems into a unified high-performance solution"

PlusAI ★ - "AI and Autonomous Driving R&D is based in the heart of Silicon Valley". And maybe some in China.

Ambarella ★ - Santa Clara and China (or the other way around). "Flexible computer vision engine with DNN processing".

Pony.ai ★ - Silicon Valley and Beijing.

JingChi ★ - Sunnyvale and Bejing.

Roadstar.ai ★ - Cupertino and China.

SAIC ★ - not the weaponeers (who sponsored DARPA Highlander), but the Chinese car maker. San Jose.

Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation ★ - "Professional transportation for any occasion." Very strange.

Cyngn ★ - Strangely (and a bit sadly) formerly Cyanogen mod. Palo Alto.

Phantom AI ★ - Burlingame (San Matteo). Some bad luck for them. Looks like they are more interested in remote controlled driving, mostly aimed at getting true autonomous systems out of weird puzzles. Note that such technology is clearly superior for military transport, the original motivation for the DARPA Challenge.

SF Motors ★ - EV maker. "Headquartered in Silicon Valley" (Santa Clara) and perhaps China.

Aeva "A New Paradigm in Autonomous Navigation". (Palo Alto)

apollo.auto - Baidu’s open architecture software platform for autonomous driving systems, i.e. reference vehicles and hardware platform. Maps, simulation engine, data, etc. (Maybe somewhat in Silicon Valley but Chinese originally)

TuSimple ★ - Ottoesque. Doing ok. (San Diego)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_Future ★ - (Los Angeles)

EasyMile - The only truly non-vapor company?

Navya - Looks like easymile; maybe that’s just the French style. (Paris, Lyon)

Oxbotica - Autonomous milk delivery? Their Heathrow ground support project is an excellent idea. (London)

Elektrobit - Security, software, compliance, safety, testing. (Germany)

Argo - (Pittsburgh) Ford just dumped a billion $ into this company.

nutonomy - MIT spin off, Cambridge(MA), Santa Monica, Singapore

Oshkosh Corporation - See (TerraMax)

ARRB Group - Makes road quality survey equipment.

Einride - Trucks. Goteborg, Sweden

Gray Matter - 4th (within 10% of winning time) original DARPA Grand Challenge.

Clearpath Robotics - little autonomous vehicles. (Canada)

Local Motors - Looks like they have a sensible shuttle like easymile.com. (Berlin, TN, MD, AZ, CO?)

Huawei - Chinese telecom hardware claims to make cars autonomous with cell phones. They should talk to Mr. Hotz.

Miovision - "Traffic data platform" (Canada).

Algolux - Computer vision and machine learning specialists. (Canada)

Weather Telematics - Weather and road hazard alert data. (Canada)

Algocian - Machine learning. (Canada)

torc.ai - From the VTech Darpa team. Military stuff. Now entering consumer market? (Virginia)

Braincorp - Building the future of autonomous navigation for sensible things other than passenger cars. (San Diego)

Seegrid - Similar to Braincorp.

Dynamic Research, Inc. - Love the Soft Car 360! (Torrence, CA)

Claytex - Simulation software for automotive systems. (UK)

Sentient+ - Sweden.

Transdev - France. Partnering with Delphi.

Avis Budget Group - signed a deal to provide support to Waymo (New Jersey)

Lytx - Fleet safety management. Not AV exactly but interesting (San Diego).

PolySync - Retrofit kits? (Portland, Ann Arbor)

Autonomous Intelligent Driving - Associated with Audi (Munich)

Wheego Technologies ★ - Low speed electric vehicles. (Atlanta)

VTT Technical Research - Snow driving because Finland.

Einride. No cabin all electric cargo vehicle. (Sweden?)

Tesloop is not using autonomous cars now but I’m sure they’d love to. The business model is interesting.

Linaro seems to want to spread the ARM processor ecosystem to autonomous cars.

Qualcomm ★ - The tech company in San Diego. Friends with Blackberry? Really?

Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. Ltd. ★ - Friends with Tencent. China.

Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co. Ltd - Friends with Baidu.

aiPod ★ - Interesting concepts for smaller than normal vehicles. UK and Pasadena.

Univrses - Swedish software company involved with Volvo and Zenuity.

Dynamic Research - subcontract vehicle simulation applied research (LA).

KPIT - Indian company trying to ramp up AV work. For example. Relevant offices in Munich.

Great Wall Motors - "HAVAL brand of GWM has always been at the forefront of intelligent driving technology, becoming a pioneer in this sector, which not only actively promotes the development of intelligent technology in the whole industry, but also makes it possible to realize the dream of driverless driving." Friends with Baidu.

Data Speed. Doing something that involves having a fully autonomous car development platform. (Rochester Hills, Michigan). Why Lincoln MKZ is a popular dev car.

VectorZero is a cool looking company with a great mission, "Advanced Simulation Software for the Autonomous Age". In Carlsbad with some ties to UCSD. (San Diego)

Foretellix is "Enabling Safe Autonomous Vehicles with GigaScale Intelligent Verification". I don’t quite know what that means but they’re doing their best to educate me with an excellent blog. (Isreal)

Sanborn - Maps for AV applications. (Colorado)

AEV Robotics - Seem to be making a modular platform for electric vehicles. (Australia)

RefractionAI - Delivery bots. Sensible lower power/risk profile but I wonder if they really have the legal ability to operate in bike lanes. (Michigan).

LeEco - Concept cars for AV. Supposed to be vapor.

Zoox ★ - "sorry kids, zoox is in stealth mode", Menlo Park, CA fully autonomous mobility service, competent, serious, working on a compact 4-seat vehicle, fleet, well-funded, 240 people (2017-05-28) If they’re going for a radical redesign, which is sensible, working on a 1-seat car would seem smarter given occupancy statistics. Finally, (2017-11-28) the big unveiling! Just kidding. Just another company doing the normal Silicon Valley AV thing using ordinary cars showing off normal AV tech but, for pizazz, mostly working in stealth/vapor mode. Brad reviews their progress (2018-09-02). And this is strange — it’s founder has been fired.

Tetravue - From their website: "Tetravue has recently secured 10 Million Dollars in a Series A round of funding from Robert Bosch Ventures, Nautilus Capital Partners, Samsung and Foxconn."

Apple ★ - NYT on Apple scaling back its vapor; the article uses the phrase "the lack of a clearly defined vision" which says it all.

Jaguar Land Rover - "doesn’t consider its customers as cargo". Fine, be that way. Oh look, starting to find religion now (with Lyft). And the slightest mention of a Range Rover as part of an Oxford Robotics Institute initiative called "Driven".

Microsoft

Nuro ★ - ? delivery? Brad says, "…well funded and plan to operate on streets rather than sidewalks." MtnView.

CarOne ★ - ????

Nullmax ★ - Null information on this.

Samsung ★ - No real information.

Apex.AI ★ - Entire web site: "Toward a world of seamless and safe autonomous mobility." Mountainview.

Gatik AI ★ - Entire web site: "Autonomous Vehicles (L4) for Urban Logistics". Sunnyvale.

Bosch ★ - I have already covered Bosch’s AV seriousness in my blog.

Delphi ★ - Note also a very bizarre connection with BlackBerry QNX. Looks like Delphi just split into two entities in 2017. The Delphi part will be their power train business and a new entity, Aptiv, will focus on autonomous vehicles. (Pittsburgh office)

ZF, City of Friedrichshafen, Zeppelin Foundation - huge ($38e9/yr) global auto supplier talks the talk. Using Nvidia Drive PX 2 platform for something so they might be doing something. Purchased TRW for the sensor business.

Magna - Canadian parts supplier. Make cameras and possibly other things. Also a shop in Palo Alto.

Denso - Japanese parts supplier related to Toyota and NEC. This article says "What Denso brings to the table is the technology to improve the durability of IT devices against vibration and heat." Lots of IP.

Continental ★ - Huge German auto supplier. Seem to be working on AV. Even have a snazzy domain name: http://continental-automated-driving.com/ Working with Baidu.

Aisin Seiki - Working on at least parking.

Valeo ★ - Doing some road tests. Designing interiors? Or maybe this is true "Valeo today has the widest portfolio of sensors in the auto industry with ultrasonic sensors, cameras – front, rear and surround view – radars and LiDAR…" (source). Also owns www.gestigon.com which do futuristic car interfaces. Also working with Lero in Galwayr, Ireland.

3M - Interesting article hinting at their work on signs for AVs. And this too.

Siemens Purchased a related software company, TASS International

Hamamatsu makes light sensors for ADAS.

Swift Navigation makes high precision GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) products for AV applications.

TomTom - HQ in NL? Radar mapping with Bosch.

Ushr - Associated with SuperCruise. "GeoDigital Autonomous Driving is now USHR Inc." (Detroit)

Navteq/HERE - owned now by consortium of Audi, Diamler, and BMW. Article specifically about AVs and HERE. (Some presence in San Diego.)

Civil Maps - "Cognition for cars".

Mapillary - Getting some funding from car companies. (Sweden)

Mighty AI - not quite mapping but data sets for AV development.

Carmera - Mapping for autonomous applications and other fancy things. Also raised a lot of money.

Brad on Lidars and on FMCW Lidar.

2020 article about new breed of cheap (solid state usually) lidar progress. Also points out that Bosch is in the game now.

Quanergy - Lidar (dividing single laser beams?)

Blackmore FMCW lidar (Montana).

LeddarTech - Lidar (Canada)

TriLumina - Lidar

Luminar Tech - Lidar Some hype.

Velodyne - Lidar

Ibeo - (German)

Dibotics - "We make sense out of sensor data". Sensible sensor fusion specialty company. (France)

Lunewave - 300m range microwave(?) sensors.

Baraja - Very clever spectrum scan lidar where a prism is used to break up the beam into wavelength slices.

Innoviz Technologies - MEMs based forward automotive lidar. First hand reports says it works well.

Livox - a cheap but usable forward facing lidar setup which I have personally tested. Impressive price/performance. (China)

Lumotive - (Seattle) solid state lidar company using "liquid crystal metasurface" technology.

Fata Inc.

Wohr

Unitronics

Promotives

Autonomous parking is definitely a thing. And another.