Pew pew! Welcome back to The Stack, a monthly newsletter featuring the best content about the field we’re all so passionate about: self-driving cars.
This month’s edition covers some major news from us about a technology we all know and (hopefully) love: friggin’ laser beams!
Now let’s get moving.
Most self-driving systems use lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors that emit laser beams and measure how long they take to reflect back. In doing so, lidar creates a 3D view of its surroundings like the scene above. But in order to visualize objects in enough detail to safely navigate urban areas, lidar needs to create a high-resolution image. At the same time, lidar needs to be long-range so it can detect objects from a distance when traveling on highways.
That’s why we developed Argo Lidar, a proprietary lidar designed specifically for self-driving vehicles that enables their use in commercial services, from passenger ride-hailing to goods deliveries. Argo Lidar allows our self-driving system to operate safely at high speeds, which gives us flexibility to meet the needs of customers and business, from warehouses to cities, to distribution centers, and even airports. It offers:
As Argo CEO Bryan Salesky told Bloomberg TV: “We think it’s a huge competitive advantage for us.”
Lidar isn’t just for self-driving cars. The ability to visualize the world with laser beams has proven useful for a whole range of industries and gadgets. Hollywood uses them for mapping and creating massive-scale sets like those in Game of Thrones; real estate photographers use them to capture 3D listing photos; and even your humble robotic vacuum likely uses lidar to navigate around the obstacles in your home. Learn about the many surprising areas in which lidar is showing up from Ground Truth.
In other exciting Argo news, we unveiled our first self-driving prototype vehicle with Volkswagen and have begun testing on our closed course in Munich, Germany, with public road testing to follow later this year.
This will pave the way (sorry, couldn’t help ourselves) for the new all-electric self-driving VW ID. BUZZ, which will be used to cue up a commercial ride-pooling service in 2025 through MOIA—with Hamburg, Germany as the first European commercial deployment city.
As the self-driving car industry matures, will future teens need to worry about getting their licenses? Will licenses even be a *thing* anymore? And will Olivia Rodrigo’s hit song still make sense in a few years?
Yes, and probably for a while, according to the latest self-driving myth busting article from Ground Truth.
As Michelle Krebs, director of automotive relations at Autotrader Group, points out, even as self-driving cars become more widely available, they won’t be universal, and teenagers and other adults will still choose to drive themselves when they want or need to.
“Personal mobility the world over is a big thing—especially for young people,” Krebs says. “That freedom of movement leads to socio-and-economic upward mobility. That is incredibly important from a psychological point of view.”
Ford unveiled its first electrified F-150 Lightning pickup truck to oohs and ahhs and massive interest, especially around the 400-lb. capacity “frunk” (front trunk).
May was National Bike Safety Month in the U.S. and to celebrate, Argo AI employees did a bunch of group rides and held a friendly contest to see who could record the most miles in a week.
A fun piece over at the The Drive from Argo AI’s director of special operations Alex Roy.
See some other cool/important/strange/noteworthy links you want to share? We’ll take them at Stack@argo.ai! We may just include your recommendations in a future edition of this newsletter.
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Senior Software Engineer, Detection & Machine Learning Communications Specialist Engineering Manager, Lidar Electronics Technical Director of Cyber Security Global Supply Manager (Munich)
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