No One Does Anything Significantly Different than Uber ATG
By: Michael Dekort
Tags: Elon Musk, Autonomous Cars, Driverless Cars, Machine Learning, Tesla

Uber ATG recently sold itself to Aurora. (Actually, they basically paid Aurora to take it.) They did this because they spent billions of $ and were nowhere near SAE L4.

Many think that the reason ATG, Starsky and Drive.ai went out of business or failed, and why there is so much consolidation going on, is because this is much harder than people originally though and the development approach was executed poorly. Yes, it is harder than most people thought, but it is not because folks are executing a good approach poorly. The development and engineering approach itself is fatally flawed. It is untenable from a time, cost, and safety POV. Which is making this far, far, far harder to do than need be. (And no, you are not going to find some happy middle ground by choosing trucking geofences. All that does is stretch the money out a little longer.) Not only will every AV maker, trying to develop L4 systems for most public roads harm people for no reason and go bankrupt, they would fail if they all got together and pooled their resources. Reliance on the public domain and gaming-based simulation is that bad of an approach. Yes, you can make some progress and hyped videos to fool the public and VCs, but that won’t last forever. Actually, not more than a year or two.

This is all resolvable if the echo chamber and egos can get out of their own way.

More in my articles here

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-autonomous-vehicle-industry-can-be-saved-by-doing-the-opposite-of-what-is-being-done-now-b4e5c6ae9237

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — Simulation’s Next Generation (featuring Dactle)

· https://www.sae.org/news/2020/08/new-gen-av-simulation

Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Self-Inflicted and Avoidable Collapse — Ongoing Update

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/i-predicted-this-a-year-and-a-half-ago-1b47bf098b03

Proposal for Successfully Creating an Autonomous Ground or Air Vehicle

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/proposal-for-successfully-creating-an-autonomous-ground-or-air-vehicle-539bb10967b1

Simulation can create a Complete Digital Twin of the Real World if DoD/Aerospace Technology is used

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/simulation-can-create-a-complete-digital-twin-of-the-real-world-if-dod-aerospace-technology-is-used-c79a64551647

Simulation Photorealism is almost Irrelevant for Autonomous Vehicle Development and Testing

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/simulation-photorealism-is-almost-irrelevant-for-autonomous-vehicle-development-and-testing-136871dee440

Autonomous Vehicles Need to Have Accidents to Develop this Technology

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/autonomous-vehicles-need-to-have-accidents-to-develop-this-technology-2cc034abac9b

Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for AV Development — NONSENSE

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/using-the-real-world-is-better-than-proper-simulation-for-autonomous-vehicle-development-nonsense-90cde4ccc0ce

The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-hype-of-geofencing-for-autonomous-vehicles-bd964cb14d16

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — End Public Shadow/Safety Driving

· https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sae/ave_201901/index.php

My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.

Key Industry Participation

- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)

- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts

My company is Dactle

We are building an aerospace/DoD/FAA level D, full L4/5 simulation-based testing and AI system with an end-state scenario matrix to address several of the critical issues in the AV/OEM industry I mentioned in my articles below. This includes replacing 99.9% of public shadow and safety driving. As well as dealing with significant real-time, model fidelity and loading/scaling issues caused by using gaming engines and other architectures. (Issues Unity will confirm. We are now working together. We are also working with UAV companies). If not remedied these issues will lead to false confidence and performance differences between what the Plan believes will happen and what actually happens. If someone would like to see a demo or discuss this further please let me know.