Uber Traded Away Its In-House Self-Driving Effort

December 22, 2020 by Lewin Day 44 Comments

Perhaps the best-known ridesharing service, Uber has grown rapidly over the last decade. Since its founding in 2009, it has expanded into markets around the globe, and entered the world of food delivery and even helicopter transport.

One of the main headline research areas for the company was the development of autonomous cars, which would revolutionize the company’s business model by eliminating the need to pay human drivers. However, as of December, the company has announced that it it spinning off its driverless car division in a deal reportedly worth $4 billion, though that’s all on paper — Uber is trading its autonomous driving division, and a promise to invest a further $400 million, in return for a 26% share in the self-driving tech company Aurora Innovation.

Playing A Long Game

Uber’s self-driving efforts have been undertaken in close partnership with Volvo in recent years.

Uber’s driverless car research was handled by the internal Advanced Technologies Group, made up of 1,200 employees dedicated to working on the new technology. The push to eliminate human drivers from the ride-sharing business model was a major consideration for investors of Uber’s Initial Public Offering on the NYSE in 2019. The company is yet to post a profit, and reducing the amount of fares going to human drivers would make it much easier for the company to achieve that crucial goal.

However, Uber’s efforts have not been without incident. Tragically, in 2018, a development vehicle running in autonomous mode hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. This marked the first pedestrian fatality caused by an autonomous car, and led to the suspension of on-road testing by the company. The incident revealed shortcomings in the company’s technology and processes, and was a black mark on the company moving forward.

The Advanced Technology Group (ATG) has been purchased by a Mountain View startup by the name of Aurora Innovation, Inc. The company counts several self-driving luminaries amongst its cofounders. Chris Urmson, now CEO, was a technical leader during his time at Google’s self-driving research group. Drew Bagnell worked on autonomous driving at Uber, and Sterling Anderson came to the startup from Tesla’s Autopilot program. The company was founded in 2017, and counts Hyundai and Amazon among its venture capital investors.

Aurora could also have links with Toyota, which also invested in ATG under Uber’s ownership in 2019. Unlike Uber, which solely focused on building viable robotaxis for use in limited geographical locations, the Aurora Driver, the core of the company’s technology, aims to be adaptable to everything from “passenger sedans to class-8 trucks”.

Aurora has been developing self-driving technology to handle real-world situations since its founding in 2017. Being able to master the challenges of a crowded city will be key to succeeding in the marketplace.

Getting rid of ATG certainly spells the end of Uber’s in-house autonomous driving effort, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting out of the game. Holding a stake in Aurora, Uber still stands to profit from early investment, and will retain access to the technology as it develops. At the same time, trading ATG off to an outside firm puts daylight between the rideshare company and any negative press from future testing incidents.

Even if Aurora only retains 75% of ATG’s 1,200 employees, it’s doubling in size, and will be worth keeping an eye on in the future.

Hackaday Links: December 20, 2020

December 20, 2020 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

If development platforms were people, Google would be one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Android Things, Google’s attempt at an OS for IoT devices, will officially start shutting down on January 5, 2021, and the plug will be pulled for good a year later. Android Things, which was basically a stripped-down version of the popular phone operating system, had promise, especially considering that Google was pitching it as a secure alternative in the IoT space, where security is often an afterthought. We haven’t exactly seen a lot of projects using Android Things, so the loss is probably not huge, but the list of projects snuffed by Google and the number of developers and users left high and dry by these changes continues to grow. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 20, 2020” →

Label Your Shtuff!

December 19, 2020 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Joshua Vasquez wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about how his open source machine benefits greatly from having part numbers integrated into all of the 3D printed parts. It lets people talk exactly about which widget, and which revision of that widget, they have in front of them.

Along the way, he mentions that it’s also a good idea to have labels as an integrated part of the machine anywhere you have signals or connectors. That way, you never have to ask yourself which side is positive, or how many volts this port is specced for. It’s the “knowledge in the head” versus “knowledge in the world” distinction — if you have to remember it, you’ll forget it, but if it’s printed on the very item, you’ll just read it.

I mention this because I was beaten twice in the last week by this phenomenon, once by my own hand costing an hour’s extra work, and once by the hand of others, releasing the magic smoke and sending me crawling back to eBay.

The first case is a 3D-printed data and power port, mounted on the underside of a converted hoverboard-transporter thing that I put together for last year’s Chaos Communication Congress. I was actually pretty proud of the design, until I wanted to reflash the firmware a year later.

I knew that I had broken out not just the serial lines and power rails (labelled!) but also the STM32 SWD programming headers and I2C. I vaguely remember having a mnemonic that explained how TX and RX were related to SCK and SDA, but I can’t remember it for the life of me. And the wires snake up under a heatsink where I can’t even trace them out to the chip. “Knowledge in the world”? I failed that, so I spent an hour looking for my build notes. (At least I had them.)

Then the smoke came out of an Arduino Mega that I was using with a RAMPS 1.4 board to drive a hot-wire cutting CNC machine. I’ve been playing around with this for a month now, and it was gratifying to see it all up and running, until something smelled funny, and took out a wall-wart power supply in addition to the Mega.

All of the parts on the RAMPS board are good to 36 V or so, so it shouldn’t have been a problem, and the power input is only labelled “5 A” and “GND”, so you’d figure it wasn’t voltage-sensitive and 18 V would be just fine. Of course, you can read online the tales of woe as people smoke their Mega boards, which have a voltage regulator that’s only good to 12 V and is powered for some reason through the RAMPS board even though it’s connected via USB to a computer. To be honest, if the power input were labelled 12 V, I still might have chanced it with 18 V, but at least I would have only myself to blame.

Part numbers are a great idea, and I’ll put that on my list of New Year’s resolutions for 2021. But better labels, on the device in question, for any connections, isn’t even going to wait the couple weeks until January. I’m changing that right now.

Hackaday Podcast 098: China’s Moon Rocks, Antikythera Revelations, Creality Vs Octoprint, And RC Starship

December 18, 2020 by Tom Nardi No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi contemplate a few of the most interesting stories that made their way through the tubes this week. We’ll learn how old VHS tapes can be turned into a unique filament for your 3D printer, and realize that the best way to learn about a 2,000 year old computer is to break out the hand drill and make one yourself. Hobby grade RC gear and a some foam board stand in for SpaceX’s next-generation Mars spacecraft, and a manufacturer of cheap 3D printers attempts to undercut a popular open source project with hilarious results. Finally, we’ll take a close look at some hidden aluminum boogers and discuss how China’s history making trek to the Moon might be a prelude to the country making a giant leap of their own.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB)

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Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 098: China’s Moon Rocks, Antikythera Revelations, Creality Vs Octoprint, And RC Starship” →

This Week In Security: SolarWinds And FireEye, WordPress DDoS, And Enhance!

December 18, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 11 Comments

The big story this week is Solarwinds. This IT management company supplies network monitoring and other security equipment, and it seems that malicious code was included in a product update as early as last spring. Their equipment is present in a multitude of high-profile networks, like Fireeye, many branches of the US government, and pretty much any other large company you can think of. To say that this supply chain attack is a big deal is an understatement. The blame has initially been placed on APT42, AKA, the Russian hacking pros.

The attack hasn’t been without some positive effects, as Fireeye has released some of their internal tooling as open source as a result. Microsoft has led the official response to the attack, managing to win control of the C&C domain in court, and black-holing it.

The last wrinkle to this story is the interesting timing of the sale of some Solarwinds stock by a pair of investment firms. If those firms were aware of the breech, and sold their shares before the news was made public, this would be a classic case of illegal insider trading. Continue reading “This Week In Security: SolarWinds And FireEye, WordPress DDoS, And Enhance!” →

Remoticon Video: How To Use Max In Your Interactive Projects

December 17, 2020 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

When you want to quickly pull together a combination of media and user interaction, looking to some building blocks for the heavy lifting can be a lifesaver. That’s the idea behind Max, a graphical programming language that’s gained a loyal following among anyone building art installations, technology demos (think children’s museum), and user Kiosks.

Guy Dupont gets us up to speed with a how to get started with Max workshop that was held during the 2020 Hackaday Remoticon. His crash course goes through the basics of the program, and provides a set of sixteen demos that you can play with to get your feet under you. As he puts it, if you need sound, video, images, buttons, knobs, sensors, and Internet data for both input and output, then Max is worth a look. Video of the workshop can be found below.

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Teardown: Siemens 8mm SMD Parts Feeder

December 16, 2020 by Jenny List 22 Comments

Many of Hackaday’s readers will be no stranger to surface mount electronic components, to the extent that you’ll likely be quite comfortable building your own surface-mount projects. If you have ever built a very large surface-mount project, or had to do a number of the same board though, you’ll have wished that you had access to a pick-and-place machine. These essential components of an electronics assembly line are CNC robots that pick up components from the reels of tape in which they are supplied, and place them in the appropriate orientation in their allotted places on the PCB. They are an object of desire in the hardware hacker community and over the years we’ve seen quite a few home-made examples. Their workings are easy enough to understand, but there is still much to gain by studying them, thus it was very interesting indeed to see a friend acquiring a quantity of surplus Siemens component feeders from an older industrial pick-and-place machine. A perfect opportunity for a teardown then, to see what makes them tick.

Continue reading “Teardown: Siemens 8mm SMD Parts Feeder” →