Uber Driverless Technology

History
In 2016, then-CEO Travis Kalanick argued that autonomous technology was existential for
the ride-hailing company.

Accordingly Uber has heavily invested in its Advanced Technologies Group- the group
heading up development of its driverless solutions. The group has grown from a team of 40
Pittsburgh-based researchers in 2015 to a 1,000-person workforce spread across offices in
San Francisco and elsewhere. It incurred $457 million of research and development
expenses in 2018, a year after Uber opened an ATG unit in Toronto and said it would invest
more than $150 million to grow its self-driving car and AI operations there.

Uber’s initial fleet included 20 Ford Fusions, each of which were packed with around 20
cameras, seven lasers, a GPS, radar and LIDAR, a technology that measures the distance
reached by outgoing lasers so cars can “see” and interpret the action around them.

Application and Need for the Technology

A large part of Uber’s costs come from the recruitment and incentives for drivers. Drivers
typically receive roughly 70 percent of each fare. In addition, Uber spent $1 billion in 2018
on driver referrals and “excess driver incentives”—that is, incentives the company paid out
beyond what the driver brought in in revenue. The incentives alone totalled $837 million in
2018.

Having driverless cars would help Uber cut out the need for human drivers and thus a major
chunk of the costs.

The major areas of Uber’s research in this field are:

1) Perception and prediction

ATG’s work perceives and understands the dynamic environment around a self-driving car
through a multi-sensor setup and uses this sensor information to predict possible future
states of the world.
2) Motion planning

Given the observations and the predictions of the dynamic actors around the self-driving
vehicle, as well as the static constructs provided by HD maps, the problem of motion
planning is to efficiently solve for the trajectory the self-driving vehicle will follow.

3) Simulation

Simulation facilitates realistic scenario evaluation and training for the entire self-driving
stack, allowing for scalable research and safety analysis of self-driving algorithms.

4) Mapping

AI-based methods to automate and assist human-in-the-loop HD map production processes

through machine learning and computer vision applied to offline map generation pipelines.

5) Localization

Efficient and effective multi-sensor approaches help localize the self-driving vehicle within
the HD map in real time. Our research focuses on LiDAR point clouds, camera imagery and
other sources of information to boost the robustness of localization algorithms.

6) Core AI tech

The fundamentals of machine learning science such as sparse and efficient operations for
real-time inference, theoretical analysis of the robustness and safety of neural networks,
stochastic and non-linear optimization, learning in the presence of noisy biased data, and
more.

Achievements
Following the first experiments with the Ford Fusions, the Volvo XC90 became the vehicle of
choice for automation in Uber's first rides on the streets of Pittsburgh.

Uber took advantage of the relative freedom to dive into testing in Pittsburgh at full
strength, even to the point of building a fake city called Almono outside town to test cars
before unleashing them in the Steel City.

In late 2017, Uber extended its tests to Canada, and set two automated cars on the streets
of Toronto.
Uber revealed that it’s collected data from millions of autonomous vehicle testing miles to
date and completed tens of thousands of passenger trips with a fleet of 250 vehicles.

In 2016, Uber claimed that it managed the world’s first such driverless commercial delivery
in partnership with AB InBev. It transported beer in a 18 wheeler cruiser over a distance of
more than 120 miles.
It was a signal of intent after Uber partnered with Otto , another ambitious player in the
driverless technology market.

Challenges

Tests and accidents

In March 2017, one of Uber's automated car was in a crash in Tempe, although blame fell on
the human driver of another car for not yielding the right of way. Uber briefly suspended its
fleet in order to investigate. A later crash happened in September, but, again, human error
was involved.

In March 2018, an Uber self-driving car in Tempe, Arizona struck a pedestrian who was
walking outside of a crosswalk at night.

Though the car detected it needed to make an emergency braking manoeuvre 1.3 seconds
before it struck the pedestrian who would later die of her injuries, the system doesn't alert
the driver to take control of the vehicle.

Following the March 18, 2018 fatality involving one of its vehicles, the future of Uber's self-
driving car program was in limbo. Tests were suspended for a long time.

Arizona's governor has suspended Uber's ability to test self-driving cars in the state, and
Uber will not seek to reapply for a self-driving permit in California, effectively shutting down
its testing there for the foreseeable future.

Current Scenario

Uber plans to take findings from the NTSB (National Transport Safety Board) investigation to
make changes to its self-driving car program. The company is also undergoing an internal
safety review.

Uber ATG is putting a small handful of self-driving vehicles on Pittsburgh’s public roads and
only during daylight hours on weekdays. The self-driving tests will occur in Pittsburgh’s Strip
District, an area where other companies such as Argo AI and Aurora are developing
autonomous vehicle technology.

Uber will require “mission specialists,” to be in the test vehicles whether they’re being
manually driven or in autonomous mode. These employees will be limited to four hours
behind the wheel in a workday and must take a break and switch positions every two hours.
The remainder of the workday will be spent on other responsibilities outside of the vehicle.

Uber has made technical changes to its self-driving software to improve detection and
tracking of pedestrians and cyclists, and to drive more defensively, as well as the addition of
a driver monitoring system, which detects a distracted operator, sounds an audible alert in
the cabin and immediately sends a notification to a remote monitoring team for review and
escalation.

References:

https://www.techradar.com/news/uber-self-driving-cars

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/technology/uber-self-driving-cars.html

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/uber-self-driving-car-testing-resumes-pittsburgh/

https://www.uber.com/us/en/atg/research-and-development/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/uber-self-driving-truck-packed-with-
budweiser-makes-first-delivery-in-colorado