Robotic Taxis and Self-Driving Rides for the Next Generation of Robots: An Open Question for the Future of Autonomous Vehicles
A self-driving ride-hail service would put Tesla in direct competition with other tech developers with years’ worth of head starts. It says it is giving 100,000 paid trips per week in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles. It has plans to launch in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, next year. Amazon plans to launch an autonomously taxi service later this year in Las Vegas, and is currently testing a type ofrobotaxi in the city.
An eccentric billionaire is going to demonstrate a futuristic technology, which he says will transform the world, with perhaps a humanoid robot by his side.
profit margins on its cars are consistently in the double digits, which is very attractive for an auto company. But Musk has a particular interest in the software industry’s profit margins.
Analyst George Gianarikas of Canaccord Genuity Group notes that Musk’s approach requires billions of dollars of upfront investment in AI, but much cheaper hardware on vehicles. That combination is expensive right now, but it would pay off if millions of robotaxis were on the road.
A fully electric fleet’s value is so huge, it’s hard to believe. In 2021, he spoke to investors. “That will be one of the most valuable things that’s ever done in the history of civilization.”
While there are definitely reasons to be skeptical about the electric car company’s services, there is a track record of when skeptics are wrong.
Companies like Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise, meanwhile, have already sent driverless taxis onto streets — although Cruise put human “safety drivers” back behind the wheel after a crash last year. Someone is on call to help the car if it gets stuck. According to data provided to the state of California, Waymo drove close to a million miles of self-controlled car, with a total of 14 disengages, or times the software required manual control.
The robotaxis are unprofitable for those companies. A survey done by J.D. Power shows that people don’t think taxis are practical, because they like the robotaxis experience. Until they’re cheaper and cover more ground, the pollsters concluded, “the service will remain a novelty transportation method.”
Musk built a system based on cheap cameras and no other inputs, even though other companies use expensive high-tech sensors. Musk also has embraced “end-to-end learning,” where the artificial intelligence “learns” how to drive from raw data; other companies add human-designed rules and guardrails to their AI systems.
Aurora has a website, and it explains thatTesla uses a “train and pray” approach where you fix a problem by throwing more data at the system. “We find this to be problematic in a safety-critical industry where you need confidence and proof you’ve actually fixed it.”
Anderson helped to launch the first partial automation systems atTesla, where he worked, the Aurora email notes. A former Tesla executive is working in the team for Waymo.
Getting the Most Out of Regulatory Regulation: The Case of the Robotaxi–Cybercab-Reveal-Tesla
The United States still has no federal laws governing self-driving, so a patchwork of state and city regulators set the boundaries of what companies can and cannot do.
Musk has always acknowledged that achieving full self-driving is not just a matter of technological innovation; if regulators aren’t convinced a robotaxi fleet is safe, it isn’t going anywhere.
That has implications for the design of vehicles. Cruise recently abandoned plans for a futuristic robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel, returning to a more conventional design that a human could operate, primarily to reduce the risk of running afoul of regulators.
Software could be affected by governmental concerns. Gianarikas says regulators who dig into the coding of a system built by “end-to-end” deep learning might not like what they find.
You can imagine a situation where regulators just kind of have this moment. You don’t … have any hard-coded software rules?” He says so. “‘How do you control it?’”
Source: Tesla is expected to unveil a robotaxi tonight: 5 things to know
We, Robot: What is the Future of Humanoid Robots? An Expert’s View on Musk’s Attractor at Tesla
The event’s name — “We, Robot” — is a nod to a classic Isaac Asimov short story collection exploring the ethical and psychological implications of building increasingly human-like robots. It’s also the title of a very vaguely related Will Smith action movie.
“I think the long-term value of Optimus will exceed that of everything else at Tesla combined,” Musk told investors this summer. “A humanoid robot that can do pretty much anything you asked of it. … I think everyone on Earth is going to want one.”
The analyst who is a long-time bull of the company will be at the event. He’s less interested in androids and more in whether Musk can demonstrate a fully autonomous vehicle that actually works.