Dmitri Dolgov is the CTO of Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Waymo's Twitter: https://twitter.com/waymo
Waymo's Website: https://waymo.com

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:16 - Computer games
7:23 - Childhood
9:55 - Robotics
10:44 - Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
12:56 - DARPA Urban Challenge
23:16 - Waymo origin story
38:58 - Waymo self-driving hardware
47:31 - Connected cars
53:23 - Waymo fully driverless service in Phoenix
57:45 - Getting feedback from riders
1:05:58 - Creating a product that people love
1:11:49 - Do self-driving cars need to break the rules like humans do?
1:18:33 - Waymo Trucks
1:24:11 - Future of Waymo
1:37:23 - Role of lidar in autonomous driving
1:50:23 - Machine learning is essential for autonomous driving
1:54:25 - Pedestrians
2:01:02 - Trolley problem
2:05:30 - Book recommendations
2:16:56 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Dmitry Dolgov, the CTO of Waymo, which is an autonomous driving company that started as Google's self-driving car project in 2009 and became Waymo in 2016.

Waymo's currently leading in the fully autonomous vehicle space in that they actually have an at-scale deployment of publicly accessible autonomous vehicles driving passengers around with no safety driver, with nobody in the driver's seat.

This, to me, is an incredible accomplishment of engineering on 1 of the most difficult and exciting artificial intelligence challenges of the 21st century.

Quick mention of a sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

Thank you to Trial Labs, a company that helps businesses apply machine learning to solve real world problems.

Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books.

BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional.

And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends.

Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount at the support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that autonomous and semi-autonomous driving was the focus of my work at MIT and as a problem space that I find fascinating and full of open questions from both robotics and a human psychology perspective.

There's quite a bit that I could say here about my experiences in academia on this topic that revealed to me, let's say, the less admirable sides of human beings.

But I choose to focus on the positive, on solutions, on brilliant engineers like Dmitry and the team at Waymo who work tirelessly to innovate and to build amazing technology that will define our future.

Because of Dmitry and others like him, I'm excited for this future.

And who knows, perhaps I too will help contribute something of value to it.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Dmitry Dolgov.

When did you first fall in love with robotics or even computer science more in general?

Computer science first, at a fairly young age.

I think my first interesting introduction to computers was in the late 80s, when we got our first computer.

Remember those things that had like a turbo button in the front,

So go on something, then 5 inches and 3 inches.

Maybe that was before that was the giant plates and I didn't get that.

I spent the first few months just playing video games, as you would expect.

So I started messing around and trying to figure out how to make the thing do other stuff.

And a couple of years later, it got to a point where

I actually wrote a game, a little game, and a game developer,

a Japanese game developer actually offered to buy it for me for a few hundred bucks, but for a kid in Russia.

Yes, that was not the most acute financial move that I made in my life, looking back at it now.

I instead put it, well, you know, I had a reason.

It was not open source, but you could upload the binaries, you would put the game online.

And the idea was that, you know, people like it and then they, you know, contribute and they send you little donations, right?

So I did my quick math of like, you know, of course, you know, thousands and millions of people are gonna play my game, send me a couple

of bucks a piece, you know, should definitely do that.

As I said, not the best financial position in

You're already playing with business models at that young age.

And it had a graphical component, so it's not text-based.

Yeah, yeah, it was like, I think 320 by 200, whatever it was, I think that kind of the earlier version.

And I actually think the reason why this company wanted to buy it is not like the fancy graphics or the implementation.

1 of the things, it's so funny, I used to play this game called Golden Axe and the simplicity of the graphics and something about the simplicity of the music, like it still haunts me.

I don't know if that's a childhood thing.

I don't know if that's the same thing for Call of Duty these days for young kids, but I still think that the, when the games are simple, that simple purity makes for, like allows your imagination to take over and thereby creating a more magical experience.

Like now with better and better graphics, it feels like your imagination doesn't get to create worlds, which is kind of interesting.

It could be just an old man on a porch, like waving at kids these days that have no respect.

But I still think that graphics almost get in the way of the experience.

I don't, yeah, but that's more about games that, like, that's more like Tetris world where they optimally, masterfully, like, create a fun, short-term dopamine experience versus, I'm more referring to like role-playing games where there's like a story, you can live in it for months or years.

Like there's an Elder Scrolls series, which is probably my favorite set of games.

The characters were all randomly generated, but they're, I don't know.

It's like an interactive version of an Elder Scrolls Tolkien world, and you get to live in it.

It's 1 of the things that suck about being an adult is there's no, you have to live in the real world as opposed to the Elder Scrolls world.

You know, whatever brings you joy, right?

You create, like it's not the fancy graphics, but it's the creation of your own worlds.

You know, 1 of the pitches for being a parent that people tell me is that you can like use the excuse of parenting to go back into the video game world and like, that's like, you know, father, son, father, daughter time, but really you just get to play video games with your kids.

Anyway, at that time, did you have any ridiculous, ambitious dreams of where as a creator you might go as an engineer?

What did you think of yourself as an engineer, as a tinker, or did you want to be like an astronaut or something like that?

You know, I'm tempted to make something up about, you know, robots, engineering, or, you know, mysteries of the universe, but That's not the actual memory that pops into my mind when you ask me about childhood dreams, so I'll actually share

When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, I, as we all do, I thought about what I wanted to do when I grow up.

And I had this dream of being a traffic control cop.

But back in the 80s in Russia, you probably are familiar with that, Lex.

They had these police officers that would stand in the middle of an intersection all day, and they would have their striped, black and white batons that they would use to control the flow of traffic.

And for whatever reason, I was strangely infatuated with this whole process, and that was my dream.

That's what I wanted to do when I grew up.

parents, both physics profs, by the way, I think were, you know, a little concerned with that level of ambition coming from their child.

Well, it's an interesting, I don't know if you can relate, but I very much love that idea.

I have a OCD nature that I think lends itself very close to the engineering mindset, which is you want to kind of optimize, you know, solve a problem by creating an automated solution, like a set of rules, the set of rules that you can follow and then thereby make it ultra efficient.

I don't know if that's, it was of that nature.

There's like fact, like Sim City and factory building games, all those kinds of things kind of speak to that engineering mindset.

I think it was the uniform and the, you know, the stripe baton that made cars go

I guess, you know, working on the transportation industry 1 way or another.

Maybe it was my deep inner infatuation with the traffic control batons that led to this career.

Okay, when did you, when was the leap from programming to robotics?

After, and actually, then with self-driving cars was I think my first real hands-on introduction to robotics.

But I never really had that much hands-on experience in school and training.

Then in college, I did more abstract computer science.

And it was after grad school that I really got involved in robotics, which was actually self-driving cars.

So I went to grad school in Michigan and then I did a postdoc at Stanford, which was the postdoc where I got to play with self-driving cars.

So for episode 100, I talked to my dad and also I grew up with my dad, I guess.

So I had to put up with him for many years.

And he went to the FISTIEH, or MIPT, it's weird to say in English because I've heard all of this in Russian, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

And to me that was like, I met some super interesting, as a child I met some super interesting characters.

It felt to me like the greatest university in the world, the most elite university in the world.

And just the people that I met that came out of there were like, not only brilliant, but also special humans.

It seems like that place really tested the soul.

Both in terms of technically and spiritually.

So that could be just the romanticization of that place, I'm not sure, so maybe you can speak to it.

But is it correct to say that you spent some time at FISTECH?

6 years, I got my bachelor's and master's in physics and math there.

And it's actually interesting because my dad, actually both my parents went there, and I think all the stories that I heard, just like you, Alex, growing up about the place and how interesting and special and magical it was, I think that was a significant, maybe the main reason I wanted to go there for college.

Enough so that I actually went back to Russia from the US, I graduated high school in the US.

Exactly the reaction most of my peers in college had, but perhaps a little bit stronger, that point me out as this crazy kid.

Yeah, yeah, I gave them your previous question.

They supported me, letting me pursue my passions and the things that

You know, definitely fairly hardcore on the fundamentals of math and physics and lots of good memories from those times.

I had the great fortune and great honor to join Stanford's DARPA Urban Challenge team in 2006.

This was a third in the sequence of the DARPA challenges.

There were 2 grand challenges prior to that.

And then in 2007, they held the DARPA Urban Challenge.

So, you know, I was doing my post-doc I had, I joined the team and worked on motion planning for that competition.

So, okay, so for people who might not know, I know from a certain, autonomous vehicles is a funny world.

In a certain circle of people, everybody knows everything.

And then in a certain circle, nobody knows anything in terms of general public.

It's a good question what to talk about, but I do think that the urban challenge is worth revisiting.

It's a fun little challenge, 1 that, first of all, it sparked so much, so many incredible minds to focus on 1 of the hardest problems of our time in artificial intelligence.

So that's a success from a perspective of a single little challenge.

But can you talk about what did the challenge involve?

So were there pedestrians, were there other cars?

So the way that the challenge was constructed and just a little bit of backgrounding, as I mentioned, this was the third competition in that series.

The first 2 were the Grand Challenge, called the Grand Challenge.

The goal there was to just drive in a completely static environment.

So then DARPA followed with what they called the Urban Challenge, where the goal was to have, you know, build vehicles that could operate in more dynamic environments and, you know, share them with other vehicles.

There were no pedestrians there, But what DARPA did is they took over an abandoned Air Force base, and it was kind of like a little fake city that they built out there.

And they had a bunch of robots, cars that were autonomous in there all at the same time, mixed in with other vehicles driven by professional drivers.

So there's a crude map that they received at the beginning.

And they had a mission, go here and then there and over here.

And they all were sharing this environment at the same time they had to interact with each other, they had to interact with the human drivers.

So it's this very first, very rudimentary version of a self-driving car that could operate in an environment shared with other dynamic actors.

That, as you said, really, in many ways, kick-started this whole industry.

Okay, so who was on the team and how'd you do?

I think the Stanford team came in first in the DARPA challenge, but then I joined the team.

I mean, do you have sort of memories of some particularly challenging things?

1 of the cool things, this isn't a product, this isn't the thing that, you know, it there's, you have a little bit more freedom to experiment so you can take risks and there's, so you can make mistakes.

Is there interesting challenges that stand out to you?

Or something that taught you a good technical lesson or a good philosophical lesson from that time?

Not really a challenge, but like 1 of the most vivid memories that I have from the time.

And I think that was actually 1 of the days that really got me hooked on this whole field was the first time I got to run my software on the car.

And I was working on a part of our planning algorithm that had to navigate in parking lots.

So it was something that called free space motion planning.

So the very first version of that, we tried on the car, it was on Stanford's campus in the middle of the night, and you had this little course constructed with cones in the middle of a parking lot.

By the time we got the code to compile and turn over.

And it drove, I could actually did something quite reasonable and it was of course very buggy at the time and had all kinds of problems, but it was pretty darn magical.

I remember going back and, you know, later at night and trying to fall asleep and just being unable to fall asleep for the rest of the night, just my mind was blown.

And that's what I've been doing ever since for more than a decade.

In terms of challenges and, you know, it's interesting memories, like on the day of the competition, it was pretty nerve wracking.

I remember standing there with Mike Montemarolo, who was the software lead and wrote most of the code.

I think I did 1 little part of the planner, Mike, you know, incredibly that, you know, pretty much the rest of it with, with, you know, a bunch of other incredible people.

But I remember standing on the day of the competition, you know, watching the car with Mike and your cars are completely empty, right?

They're all there lined up in the beginning of the race.

And then DARPA sends them on their mission 1 by 1.

Each siren had its own personality, if you will.

And then every once in a while, they come a little bit closer to where the audience is and you can kind of hear, you know, the sound of your car and, you know, it seems to be moving along.

And then, you know, it goes away and you can't hear it for too long, you start getting anxious, right?

So it's a little bit like, you know, sending your kids to college and like, you know, kind of you invested in them.

You hope you, you, you, you, you, you, you build it properly, but like it's still anxiety inducing.

So that was an incredibly fun few days in terms of, you know, bugs.

As you mentioned, you know, 1 that was my bug that caused us the loss of the first place.

There's still a debate that occasionally have with people on the CMU team.

It's really a glitch that they happen to succeed at something robotics related.

So for people, yeah, that's true, unlike Stanford.

For people who don't know, CMU is 1 of the great robotics and sort of artificial intelligence universities in the world.

So in The part that I contributed to, which was navigating parking lots, and the way that part of the mission worked is, in a parking lot, you would get from DARPA an outline of the map.

You basically get this giant polygon that defined the perimeter of the parking lot.

And there would be an entrance, and maybe multiple entrances or access to it.

And then you would get a goal within that open space, xy heading, where the car had to park.

It had no information about the obstacles that the car might encounter there.

So it had to navigate a completely free space from the entrance to the parking lot into that parking space.

And then Once parked there, it had to exit the parking lot, while of course, and counting and reasoning about all the obstacles that it encounters in real time.

So our interpretation, or at least my interpretation of the rules was that you had to reverse out of the parking spot.

And that's what our cars did, even if there's no optical in front.

That's not what CMU's car did, and it just kind of drove right through.

And of course, as you stop and then reverse out and go out the different way, that costs you some time.

And so there's still a debate whether it was my poor implementation that cost us extra time or whether it was CMU violating an important rule of the competition.

In terms of other bugs, and I have to apologize to Mike Montemarola for sharing this on air, but it is actually 1 of the more memorable ones.

And it's something that's kind of become a bit of a metaphor and

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Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars | Lex Fridman Podcast #147