Robotics, Algorithm Development and Humanity

Why hasn't any established vehicle manufacturer (VM) nor mega supplier been able to lead the development of autonomous driving technology?

In September 2024 I visited IAA2024 commercial vehicle trade show and I asked myself this question. Demand for logistics has been growing and the shortage of truck drivers can only get worse, so the automated driving is critical to keep our infrastructure.

And did any of the aforementioned companies shows significant progress with internal R&D? As far as I could observe with the public info in the exhibition center and web research, the answer is "no".

Instead a bunch of start-ups and scale-ups, Aurora , Plus , followed by Torc Robotics, seemingly lead its advancements in Hub2Hub automated driving use cases. (More into this topic, there're great strategic summaries by Wojciech Siwik 's LinkedIn posts ) And I'm curious about Tesla Semi, Tesla is not that vocal for its use cases and I'd love to learn more.

VMs had chosen to work with these young companies, mega suppliers are suppliers to these new tech companies. The established players have many significant competences which I value a lot. They, however, are not the leading software developers. Their organisations and business practices, HR policies are often not tailored to enable talented software engineers to perform at their full potentials. Changing a corporate culture is proven to be a huge challenge and this is another case to prove this from my perspective.

And I hope things change in future - VM and mega suppliers had a hard lesson for the last one decade, some of them have shown the sign of change, I'm excited to hear news in this direction.

Around the same time, I watched the following video (please activate auto-translate if you can't understand Japanese), and I believe it gave me fundamental insights, what the autonomous driving and robotics of the future would need to base its development method.

Video: Revolution, or "reincarnation into another world", of Robotics Control Engineering, - Visiting fuRo Labs of Chiba Institute of Technology fuRo

(ロボット設計に革命の「異世界転生」技術が凄すぎた！ホリエモンが千葉工業大学fuRoを訪問)

Here is a brief summary

• Data-oriented algorithm development is the future, including real-time sensor data based algorithm development. Prof. Furuta in the video, a researcher of control engineering expressed, half seriously half humourously, the paradigm shift as 'despair' for the researchers, who have spent years in more conventional methods like rule-based control logics

• Sensor set: Vision sensors including camera, radar, lidars are important. But sensors of other kinds are critically important - Prof. Furuta discusses with Mr. Horie, a famous tech entrepreneur in Japan, about the important of 'internal organ' as a multi-faceted sensor and noise generator, which he considers important for robotics application that should replace human manual actions

• Energy efficiency - Robotics are electrically driven, and he considers human as more efficient for many physical actions - the muscle can require less power consumption, 'fuzzy' decision making process takes less power with a brain than a computer for many applications. It's interesting and convincing, and it makes me wonder how the future of humanity should be - Technically, I was involved in the electro-active polymer (Wiki) actuator aka artificial muscle project, so it was so intuitive for me to get his point. I get a feeling, that I might need to reconsider my approach how to position computing and human powers in doing my work.

I recommend to watch the video if these 3 pointes are of interest to you.

And here come a bit of my personal story.

Since I was a teenager, I have been attracted in the world of computing. As my career had evolved in the fields of automated driving and connected vehicles, I regularly check the latest development and talk to the industry insiders in these field.

And luckily since October, I work in a tech company that specialises in the connectivity technology for mission critical applications. I can say it is one of my dream jobs, to be in touch with many tech companies in various fields.

And at my current company, we call the important topics as 'Rocks'. Then I went to the park above, designed by Isamu Noguchi, a renowned Japanese-American sculptor. I'm his huge fun for finding a beauty in simple objects and he crafted many objects inspired by such finding. I try to find beauty(or any talents of other qualities) in humans and technology, and I want to bring forward the business with their powers. Yes, I'm trying to be a 'Rock'-star ????

While the robotics application is not my primary short-term business interest, I'm hoping to get involved in this field again.

External links

Aurora Innovation Official Website

PlusAI Official Website

Future Robotics Technology Center, Chiba Institute of Technology Official Website

Takafumi Horie Wiki

• The founder of IT company Livedoor and jailed for challenging the establishment of Japan, now involved in many businesses including his space tech compan