We've been working on the prediction problem for some time. We should have a blog post coming out about our approach (it's pretty neat and in-line with this post) soon.
That's great to hear! I think upon fully reading the blog post it's clear that you meant the next leap forward it solving prediction, to the degree that perception has supposedly been solved. It will be interesting to see how y'all do. I for one want my self driving car yesterday.
Voyage’s mission is to super-charge communities with driverless vehicles. Our fleets power essential, everyday services designed to enhance each resident’s quality of living. At Voyage, we strive to become part of every community we serve.
Voyage’s first product is an autonomous taxi service located within a 160,000 resident retirement community in Florida. Here, our fleet delivers on the promise of autonomous driving - solving the mobility needs of residents who need it most. Whether a resident faces mobility restrictions, or just wants to take a ride, we take pride in getting every Voyage passenger to their destination safely, efficiently, and affordably.
We're a team of 40 engineers that have raised $23m from world-class VC's to build a massive and meaningful transportation company. We're growing the team rapidly, and are searching for engineers across multiple disciplines (machine learning, robotics, consumer software, devops, and more). If you love to ship, I think you'll love working at Voyage.
We are going to market with autonomous vehicles in a very different way, focusing on large private cities first and foremost. We intend The Villages, Florida to be the first (retirement) city that's traversable end-to-end (all 750 miles of road) in an autonomous vehicle.
We'll eventually make the leap to public cities, and it will feel gradual when it does happen.
We think about our technology quite differently, leaning on lots of partners for the infrastructure (mapping, simulation, sensors, tele-operation, middleware, and more) behind the scenes. This enforces a real focus on the un-solved autonomous algorithms.
We'll also be sharing later this year a project we're in the middle of that's dramatically different technologically to what we've seen elsewhere, utilizing the community itself to make a leap in autonomous performance.
>From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities.
We design our autonomous systems to traverse _any_ point-to-point route within an entire private (retirement) city. We intentionally don't just focus on a single, shuttle-like route. It turns out that pretty much any route in a place like The Villages is far less complex than other city-like environments, but that the business opportunity is just as large.
>What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business?
Voyage has exclusivity clauses in our agreements with our communities, where we also grant the community a slice of Voyage in the form of equity. Contracts are unfortunately meant to be broken, which means that we put a lot of effort into making sure relationships with these locations are great. We frequently host Town Halls and make sure the community is heard. This is crucial.
>I'm a self driving car engineer, why would I pick Voyage over other big players who have a lot more capital and much bigger team with a lot more people like Drew Gray?
It's a lot of fun here. Contrary to the hype, there's relatively few full-stack self-driving car startups at the Series A level. We believe our people, our technology, and go-to-market to be the best of that group.
Most importantly, when searching for new Voyage team members, we don't optimize for specific degrees or backgrounds. One of our greatest strengths is the team we've built with that philosophy.
Come for a ride (oliver@voyage.auto)! I think you might be impressed with where our technology is. It's really quite good. A lot has happened since August 2017.
We're heavily focused on a retirement city in Florida (125,000 residents on 750 miles of road) and on our G2 vehicle[1]. We recently signed a deal with Enterprise to commercially lease many, many more vehicles than our three initial prototype G1 vehicles.
Hello everyone! @olivercameron, CEO of Voyage here.
Drew is currently busy at our Testing Grounds shipping a new release, but if there's any Voyage or self-driving car related questions I can answer, I'd love to hear em'!
My previous life was at Udacity, where I spent 4 years working on their self-driving car and machine learning curriculum. I learned a ton from working with Sebastian Thrun and the rest of the Udacity team.
1) What online resources do you recommend for someone that wants to go from beginner to skilled in the field of self-driving cars? Is there a sequence of courses that you could recommend?
2) What important concepts should this self-learner hone in on as they learn?
3) How can someone that does 1) (and has projects) break into the self-driving cars career?
1) If you already have a good grasp of Python, I always advise to start with the AI for Robotics MOOC at Udacity, which is my favorite class of all time. Once that's done, I'd take a look at their Deep Learning classes and the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree.
2) I think it's crucial to get to grips with how the whole stack works, so I always advise to get to grips with a middleware like ROS. Also, don't be afraid to dabble in algorithms (think problems in motion planning, computer vision, etc.)
3) The traditional programs (think PhD programs) create a lot of specialists focused on a single domain, but the industry is in dire need of more generalists. An engineer who is able to dive into any part of the stack is a huge value-add!
How do you see the market for self-driving cars? How far is Waymo ahead of the competition? Who are the top competitors? How do you see your own position as a smaller startup?
It seems like the best self-driving systems are currently struggling with what seem to be fairly fundamental deficiencies (cant react to stationary objects on highways, dont react well to children and cyclists)
Is this a valid observation? What do you see as the biggest limitations in the current generation of self-driving technology?
Voyage’s mission is to super-charge communities with autonomous vehicles. Our fleets power essential, everyday services designed to enhance each resident’s quality of living. At Voyage, we strive to become part of every community we serve.
Voyage’s first product is an autonomous taxi service located within a 160,000 resident retirement community in Florida. Here, our fleet delivers on the promise of autonomous driving - solving the mobility needs of residents who need it most. Whether a resident faces mobility restrictions, or just wants to take a ride, we take pride in getting every Voyage passenger to their destination safely, efficiently, and affordably.
We're a team of 30 engineers that have raised $23m from world-class VC's to build a massive and meaningful transportation company. We're growing the team rapidly, and are searching for engineers across multiple disciplines (machine learning, robotics, consumer software, devops, and more). If you love to ship, I think you'll love working at Voyage.
We pride ourselves at Voyage on being open about our technology and process. This post reads a little like a press release, but I'd love to answer any candid questions about Voyage or the autonomous vehicle field. I'll be here all afternoon!
To start, I wanted to share more about the Velodyne VLS-128 LIDAR. As far as I'm aware, this is the first 128-channel LIDAR on the market, and it really is nuts.
• 9.6M points per second
• ~300 meters of range
• 360° coverage
Long-range and high-resolution LIDAR has historically been a unique advantage for Waymo, and my feeling is that the VLS-128 dramatically closes the gap for the rest of the field to have the same quality of vision.
