xedcar

This page is a collection of notes and resources related to my interest in autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars.

My Blog Posts

My Notes

Relevant highlights

My Projects

  • The SnakeOil page for my previous work on the Simulated Car Racing championships and autonomous driving AI.

snakeoil

C.A.R.

Resources

Organizations

Events

If you know of any or a better source of information for events and conferences, let me know!

Websites

Video

Courses

Official Documentation

Books

Blog Posts

Data

Articles

Autonomous Test Facilities

Companies

A great article about who is hiring among AV companies and what they’re looking for.

Classic Automotive

Heavy

  • 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.

Marine

A decent list of some important players.

Silicon Valley

  • 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)

Not Silicon Valley

  • 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).

Pure Vapor

  • 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.

Auto Industry Suppliers

Mapping

Brad on the topic of mapping. Obviously major players have in house mapping efforts (Waymo, Tesla, MobileEye).

Lidar

  • 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.

Autonomous Parking

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