This is a talk by Emilio Frazzoli for course 6.S094: Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars (2018 version). Emilio is the Co-Founder and CTO at nuTonomy. This class is free and open to everyone. It is an introduction to the practice of deep learning through the applied theme of building a self-driving car.

INFO:
Course website: https://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu
Contact: deepcars@mit.edu

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LINKS:
Playlist: https://goo.gl/SLCb1y
Lecture 1: Deep Learning - https://youtu.be/-6INDaLcuJY
Lecture 2: Self-Driving Cars - https://youtu.be/_OCjqIgxwHw
Lecture 3: Deep Reinforcement Learning - https://youtu.be/MQ6pP65o7OM
Lecture 4: Computer Vision - https://youtu.be/CLOAswsxudo
Lecture 5: Deep Learning for Human Sensing - https://youtu.be/Z2GfE8pLyxc

Guest talk: Sacha Arnoud, Waymo - https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg
Guest talk: Emilio Frazolli, nuTonomy - https://youtu.be/dWSbItd0HEA
Guest talk: Sterling Anderson, Aurora - https://youtu.be/HKBhP9JISF0

2017:
Guest talk: Sertac Karaman, MIT - https://youtu.be/0fLSf3NO0-s
Guest talk: Chris Gerdes, Stanford - https://youtu.be/LDprUza7yT4

He's the CTO of Neutonomy, 1 of the most successful autonomous vehicle companies in the world.

He's the inventor of the RRT star algorithm, formerly a professor at MIT, directing research group that put the first autonomous vehicles on road in Singapore.

And now he returns to MIT to talk with us.

I spent 15 years of my life here at MIT, first as a graduate student and then as a faculty member.

And this is where Neutronomy, the company, essentially was born.

And we did a lot of the research that led us to start this company and eventually develop all this technology.

What I will talk about today is a little bit about our vision on autonomous vehicles, why we want to have autonomous vehicles, some of the guidelines on the technology development, why we are doing things in a certain way.

I really would like to tell you a number of stories about why I started doing this and why I think this is an important technology, why we ended up starting this company.

So I've been a faculty member here for 10 years and I was happily working with my UAVs and I was in AeroAstra.

At some point around 2005, 2000, yeah, I started, you know, there was this DARPA Grand Challenges that sounded cool, right, So I started working on cars as well.

But that work that I was doing was mostly, I was working on airplanes and cars to make them fly or drive by themselves because it was cool, just look, no hands, it drives.

As a controls guy, as a roboticist, that's all I needed.

But then in 2009, there was this new project that was starting, it was a team that was getting together to write a proposal for a project on future urban mobility in Singapore, okay?

Not telling you the whole story, but essentially I got interested in the project just because I wanted to go to Singapore, okay?

And then I called the person who was putting together the team and I said, OK, thank you for your interest, but what do you think that you bring to the table?

And we had just done the Darfur Urban Challenge.

So well, I know how to make autonomous cars.

This is a project on future urban mobility, so what do cars have to do with urban mobility, autonomous cars, what do they have to do with urban mobility and there was the phone call, the 5 minute phone call that changed my life because she asked me this question, that actually was Cindy Barnard, who is now the chancellor, right?

And then I had to come up with an excuse, right, so why, well, imagine that you have a smartphone and then a smartphone app, and then you use this app to call a car.

The car comes to you, you get on the car, drive wherever you want to go, step off the car, and the car goes to pick up somebody else who goes to park or something.

Uber was Travis Kalanick and a couple of guys and black cars in San Francisco.

And essentially she bought it, so I joined the team and we started this activity.

But the important thing is that I started thinking about, you know, there was something, an excuse that I made up in those 5 minutes, okay?

But then I said, you know what, kind of sounds like a good idea.

And I started thinking more about this, and I started thinking more about why do we want to have self-driving vehicles.

So the number 1 reason that you typically hear is we want to have self-driving vehicles so that we make roads safer.

A very large number of people die on the road, road accidents, every year.

What people do not realize is that most of those people are actually fairly young, like in their 20s and 30s.

And clearly, what people usually say is that Sebastian Thrun, back in the day, he gave all these TED Talks talking about his best friend from when he was young who died in a road accident, right, and then He made a mission for his life to reduce road accidents.

But anyway, so the idea is that most of the road accidents are due to human errors.

You remove the human, you remove the errors, and then you save lives.

So this is typically the number 1 reason that people mention when they talk about why you want to have self-driving vehicles.

Essentially, if the car is driving by itself, you can do other things.

You can sleep, you can read, you can text legally to your heart's content, you can check your emails, so on and so forth, right?

Third thing is improved access to mobility.

People who cannot drive, maybe because they have some physical impairment or maybe they are too young, they are too old, or maybe too intoxicated to drive, right?

So then, you know, the computer can take them home.

Another thing is increased efficiency throughput in a city as cars can communicate beyond visual range, for example.

Another 1 is reduce environmental impact.

Now, these are all fantastic reasons why we may want to have self-driving vehicles.

The problem with me is that if you think about this, these are all good reasons, but these are all ways that you take the status quo, how cars are used today, and you make it a little bit better, maybe a lot better, but you do not make it different.

And really that is what I was mostly interested in.

Can we use this technology, leverage this technology to change the way that we think of mobility?

So how do you compare all these different things?

Okay, so this is quick, back of the envelope kind of calculation that you can do on your own.

You can question the numbers, but I think that the orders of magnitude are right.

So the first thing is, okay, so fine, we heard that a big reason for self-driving cars is to increase safety, save lives.

Well, to yourself, to your loved ones, to your friends, your family, is probably priceless.

To the government, it's worth about $9 million.

So This is what is called the cost of a statistical life.

There was a report that was released a few years ago, probably there is an update now, but I haven't seen it.

The economic cost of road accidents in the United States is evaluated to be about $300 billion a year.

The societal harm of road accidents is another, all the pain and suffering is evaluated to be another $600 billion a year, so what we are getting to is about almost 1000000000000 dollars, okay?

But let's look at where the other effects are, okay?

What is the cost of congestion is an estimate, 100 billion dollars a year.

The health cost of congestion, of the extra pollution, so another $50 billion a year, so you see that these are just a small change, right?

The next effect is actually important, right?

So what is the value of the time that we, as everybody in society, will get back from not having to drive?

Simple calculation, what I did is I multiplied 1 half the median wage of workers in the United States, which is an embarrassingly low number, multiplied by the number of hours that Americans spend behind the wheel.

And what you get is about, what was it, $1.2 trillion a year.

So something that you may notice is that the value to society of getting the time back from having to drive is actually more than the value to society of increased safety.

Of course, it's a little bit cynical, so take it with a grain of salt, but you start seeing how these things compare.

And what you may notice from this pie chart is that there is still half of that is missing.

The other half is actually the value that you provide to society, to all individuals, by essentially making car sharing finally something that is convenient to use, affordable, reliable.

So for me, car sharing or vehicle sharing in general is a concept that everybody loves, but nobody uses.

Or not as many people as we would like to use this kind of services.

Examples, when I was here at MIT, I really like using Hubway, the bicycle sharing.

If you wait too long in the afternoon, sorry, there are no more bikes on campus.

Or maybe very often you cannot find a bike, or maybe you cannot find a parking spot for your bike.

So then you had to buy somewhere else and then walk.

So that defeats the purpose of using that bike.

So typically with car sharing systems, what you have is either you have a two-way, which is essentially hourly rental, right?

Or you have a one-way, but in one-way system, then the distribution of cars tend to get skewed, right?

And unless the company repositions cars in some clever way, then you're not guaranteed that you will get the car where you need it, and you're not guaranteed that you will get the spot, the parking spot, where you don't need the car anymore.

If you think of that, these are both friction points for using vehicle sharing, and these are both friction points that are actually addressed by if the car can drive itself.

So if you bring in all the economic benefits of a car sharing system that actually works, that's something that we estimated to be, It's about $2 trillion a year.

So you see that this actually has a big chunk in this pie chart.

And that is using an estimate of what we call the sharing factor of 4, meaning that 1 of these shared vehicles can essentially substitute for 4 in privately owned vehicles.

There are some studies that get to this sharing factor up to 10, and of course the benefits are even more.

Now, every time I see a round number like that, I get suspicious.

is a little bit too convenient to be true, right, but anyway, so that's something that you can find in the literature, okay?

So, This is really where I think that the major impact of autonomous driving or self-driving cars will come from.

Now, I think that also there is a lot of confusion in the community, in the world, about what a self-driving car means.

Now, what I'm doing here, I just listed these 5 levels, it's actually 6 levels of automation.

These are the Society of Automotive Engineers levels.

So level 0 is no automation, that's your great-grandfather's car.

Driver assistance level 1, there is, for example, cruise control or some simple single channel automation.

Partial automation, you have something like, for example, lane keeping and cruise control, but you still require the driver to pay attention and intervene.

Conditional automation level 3 driver is a necessity.

It's not required to pay attention all the time, but needs to be able to intervene given some notice, okay?

And that some notice I think is kind of like ill-defined concept.

And then you have level 4 and level 5 that are like a higher automation, essentially no driver needed, in some condition that is level 4, and in all conditions that level 5.

Now, my first reaction when I started seeing these levels, and there is also a similar version by Nitsan, is that they seem to me a horrible idea.

And the horrible idea in the sense because they are given numeric levels, So you have level 01235.

Whenever you have a sequence of numbers, you're led to believe that these are actually sequential.

That you do level 0, then you do level 1, then you do level 2345I think this is enormously bad idea because I think that level 2 and level 3, that is anything where you require the human to pay attention and supervise automation and be ready to intervene with no notice or with some ambiguously defined, like sufficiently long notice, that they'll just go behind, go against human nature.

And this is especially painful for me as a former aeronautics and astronautics professor where we saw in the airline industry that as soon as autopilots were being introduced and everybody thought that accidents would go down, actually there were more accidents because now you have new failure modes induced by autopilots.

Okay, you have mode confusion, pilots lose situational awareness, pilots lose the ability to react in case of an emergency.

Okay, So the airline industry had to essentially educate itself on how to deal with automation in a good way.

And think of pilots are highly trained professionals, which is not the same that you can say about your everyday driver.

So how do you train people who probably, the last time they sat with an instructor in a car was when they were

How do you train people to use the automation technology and do it safely.

So I think this is something that I find very scary.

On the other hand, I think that the full automation when the car is essentially able to drive itself does not rely on a human to take over is something that in a sense is easier.

And this is what we are doing, but the point is that not only it is easier, but I think that it is essential to capture the value of the technology.

Now if you think of it, so how do we realize the value of these self-driving vehicles?

Okay, so the first thing that people say is safety.

I think it is true that eventually, asymptotically, self-driving cars will be safer than their human-driven counterparts.

However, at what point can we be confident that that is the case?

So how do you demonstrate the reliability of these self-driving cars?

So Waymo, they've driven their cars for 3000000 miles, right?

So with a relatively small number of accidents.

If I remember correctly, only 1 was their fault, right?

But, actually humans drive for many, many times that without accidents.

So how do you really make sure that even though the number sounds impressive, it really doesn't have that much of a statistical significance, right?

And then every time you make an update to a change to your system, to your software, you really had to validate again, right?

So I think that making the case for safety is actually, is a very challenging issue.

And we may not be positive that these self-driving cars are actually safer than their human counterparts until a fairly long time from now.

So safety for me remains kind of an open question at this point.

How do you get back the time value of driving?

If you had, at least I'm speaking for myself, if I had to constantly pay attention to what the car is doing, excuse me, but I'd rather drive myself.

Because if the car is driving, and this is the paradox, so the better the car drives, the harder it is for me to keep paying attention.

So it would be very hard for me not to fall asleep, or not to get distracted.

So if I want to get the time back, really the car must be able to drive itself without requiring me to pay attention.

Car sharing, again, is in order to make car sharing really convenient and reliable and so on and so forth, you need the car to come to you with nobody inside.

And for that you need level 4 or level 5.

Everything else for me is just a nice gadget that you have on your car that you show off to your friends or to your girlfriend, okay?

So My point is that level 4 or 5 automation is really essential to capture the value of this technology.

And in fact, the 1 game-changing feature of these cars is the fact that these cars now can move around with nobody inside.

Good, and this is really what we would like to do.

Now, there are many paths that you can go after this target, okay?

So on this figure, what I show on the horizontal axis is the scale or the scope of the kind of driving that you can do.

So on the left is like a small pilot, maybe a close course.

On the, you know, like a complex environments, right?

On the left, there is, on the vertical axis is the level of automation, okay?

Now, really what we would like to do is get to the top right corner.

So we have millions of cars driving all over the world completely in a completely automated way.

What I see is there are 2 different paths that the industry is taking.

What I show here is what I call, this is the OEM path.

So this is the automakers, So they're used to thinking of production of cars in the orders of many, many millions.

And essentially what they do is they make a lot of cars, and they are adding features to these cars, advanced driver assistance systems and so on and so forth, right?

And essentially they're following this level 012345, okay?

And today you can buy cars which, even though they claim fully autonomous package for $5,000 plus another $4,000 or something, in the fine print, they say it's level 2, right?

So Tesla, Mercedes, I think the Audi with the new Audi 8, is A8, they're coming out with this kind of feature.

The problem with that, I think that you have to cross this red band, okay?

This red band where you're actually requiring human supervision of your automation system.

Another path that people are following is this other path, okay?

So this is what we are doing, what Waymo, where all the indications that Waymo is doing, of course they're not telling me exactly what they do.

So essentially what they're doing is they're working on cars that will be fully automated from the beginning, and they start with a small, maybe geofence application, and then scale that up, that operations up, right?

But always remaining at the full, high full automation level, okay?

Another thing that is important that people make a lot of confusion and don't seem to realize the big difference is the following.

When people ask me, when do you think that we will see autonomous vehicles everywhere on the street, where autonomous vehicles will be common?

I ask them, okay, but what do you mean exactly by that?

Because if you ask me, when is it that you will be able to walk into a car dealership and get out with the keys to a car that you just push a button and it takes you home, that's not happening for another 20 years at least.

On the other hand, if you ask me when you will be able to go to some new city and summon 1 of these vehicles that picks you up and takes you to your destination, the other thing is happening within a couple of years.

There is a big difference between autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars as a consumer product versus a service that you provide to passengers.

Where do these cars need to be able to drive?

If it's a product and I pay $10,000 for it, then I want this thing to work everywhere, right?

So take me home, take me to this little alley, drive me through the countryside.

On the other hand, if I'm a service provider and I'm offering a service, I can decide, I'm offering this service in this particular location.

And by the way, I'm offering this service under these weather conditions and maybe under these traffic conditions.

So just the problem becomes much more, much easier.

So if I have to sell you a car with an autonomy package, how much can I cost?

What are my cost constraints on that autonomy package?

If I sell it to you, first of all, the cost of the autonomy package must be comparable to the cost of the vehicle.

You will not buy a $20,000 car with a half a million dollar autonomy package.

Also you can do, so another back of the envelope calculation that I did is, okay, so let's say that what is the value to you as the buyer of this autonomy package.

Let's say that the value to you is the fact that now instead of driving for the rest of, for the next 10 years, you can have the computer driving for you.

What is the value of your time as you are not driving?

So do a quick calculations again, total number of hours that Americans spend behind the wheel, median wage or value of time.

What you get is, what I get is that the net present value of the driver's time over the next 10 years is about

So then a rational buyer will not pay more than that to buy this autonomy package.

Or actually if you want to make a profit out of it, you're constrained.

Your autonomy package cannot cost more than a few thousand dollars.

On the other hand, if you're thinking of this as a service, then what you are comparing to is the cost of providing the same service using a carbon-based life form, like a human behind the wheel.

You need to hire at least, say, 3 drivers per car.

Then the cost is comparable of the order of 100k a year.

Okay, so now I'm comparing the cost of my automation package to something that is going to cost me $100,000 a year over the life of the car.

Okay, so now the cost of that lighter or that fancy computer or that fancy radar or something doesn't matter that much.

Okay, so I have much more freedom in buying the sensor that I need.

Now again, if I want to sell it as a product, I need to and I have to sell it, I want to sell it on a global scale where global could mean all the United States, for example, all of Europe.

Then I need to have maps, HD maps of the whole of Europe or the continental United States or wherever I want to sell the cars.

If I'm providing a service, then I only need to map the area where I want to provide the service.

And by the way, how does the complexity of the maps scale with the customer base that you're serving?

If you think of a uniform people density, so then actually you think that the complexity and the cost of generating maps scales with the length of the road network.

Then the cost of the maps scales with the square root of my customer base, meaning that will become manageable as I serve more people.

Okay, so HD maps, yes, it's a pain in the neck to collect them and to maintain them, but it's much less of a pain in the neck than actually operating the logistics of a fleet serving the population of a city, okay?

And servicing and maintenance, how would you calibrate your cameras and your sensors?

That's not something that you would do as a normal consumer, right?

When I was little, I was used to my father, he was tinkering with the car all the time.

Checking the timing belt or changing the oil.

You don't do any of that nowadays, right?

So You just sit in the car, switch it on, if the yellow light, check engine comes up, you take it to the dealership, that's all you do.

Now imagine that now you have, if you want to use your autonomy package, you had to calibrate the sensors every time you go out or you have to upload a new version of the drivers and things like that.

On the other hand, in the service model, I have the maintenance crew that can take care of it in a professional way.

So there are a couple of important takeaways.

So 1 thing is that the cost of the autonomy package is not really an issue.

Clearly, the cheaper I can make it, the better it is.

In particular, if you need a LiDAR sensor, for example, to detect a big truck that is crossing your path, buy the LiDAR sensor, okay?

So that is not making the difference and maybe can save some lives, okay?

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Emilio Frazzoli, CTO, nuTonomy - MIT Self-Driving Cars