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Meili founder Samantha Lee demonstrated an in-hospital automobile simulator as an autotech instance. Source: LinkedIn
As The Robot Report reported final October, one of many greatest autotech tales of the yr was the stalling of Cruise after California’s Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its driverless testing license. While Cruise has had many mishaps because the launch of its robotaxi service on the streets of San Francisco in June 2022, together with blocking emergency automobiles, parking on building websites, and holding up visitors unnecessarily, the breaking level got here after it dragged a fallen pedestrian (hit by a human driver) 20 toes beneath its chassis.
“According to the DMV, Cruise withheld footage of the incident in which its robotaxi attempted to pull over while the pedestrian was under the vehicle, dragging her for around 20 feet at a speed of 7 mph before stopping,” wrote Steve Crowe. “‘Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the [DMV], and Cruise did not disclose that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop,’ the DMV wrote.”
The implications might even threaten the job of General Motors CEO Mary Barra, who just lately boasted to Wall Street analysts that “Cruise has a tremendous opportunity to grow and expand” and that the corporate might generate $50 billion a yr in annual income by 2030. Last October, GM disclosed its billion-dollar buy of the startup misplaced over $730 million throughout Q3 2023.
Autotech guarantees unfulfilled
In 2016, John Zimmer the co-founder and president of Lyft, wrote a 16-page whitepaper predicting that almost all of rides on his community could be autonomous by 2021. By 2025, automobile possession would be a part of buggy whips as an emblem of transportation lore, he mentioned.
Zimmer was not alone on this perception. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick additionally exclaimed to Business Insider that very same yr: “I think it starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous.”
Of course, Elon Musk promoted this dogma by declaring all of Tesla’s automobiles could be “full self-driving” in 2016, enabling drivers to nap on the best way to work. (Note that Tesla just lately recalled 2 million automobiles due to its Autopilot know-how).
Reflecting on lacking these milestones might be miserable for buyers as we discover ourselves in Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment.” Still, might the approaching yr be a breakout level for autotech, enabling not simply new superior driver-assistance methods (ADAS), however even empowering disabled folks to be extra impartial behind the wheel?
Elon Musk talks about autotech on X. Source: X (previously Twitter)
Innovators flip eastward
In 2022, Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal reported an enormous shift within the progress of tech jobs from San Francisco to throughout the East Coast, with the hubris of Silicon Valley (see above) being outmaneuvered by the revenue-centric pragmatism of New York entrepreneurs.
As an instance of the ingenuity of those new Mid-Atlantic innovators, I interviewed Samatha Lee of Meili Technologies, a driver-assist well being monitoring platform for trucking fleets and different business automobiles.
Lee grew up in rural Florida about 45 minutes from Cape Canaveral the place her father labored on the launch codes for the house shuttle program. This upbringing, and particularly witnessing how her father’s epilepsy made him depending on others for transportation, formed her product imaginative and prescient.
“My dad lost his license. Probably around the time I was 15, because of his epilepsy, his seizures started to become more frequent,” Lee recalled. “And so the rule is that if you have a seizure, you aren’t allowed to drive for six months, and he started having seizures once a week.”
“And so we used to talk a lot about technology and just what it could do to help him regain his freedom or in the future what things like autonomous vehicles could do for society,” she mentioned.
After a collection of educational pursuits, Lee ended up in Wendy Ju’s lab at Cornell Tech in New York City pursuing her Ph.D. analysis in learning the interactions between people and computer systems in uncrewed methods. Lee initially got down to create in-cabin monitoring methods for totally autonomous automobiles however needed to pivot when the autotech market got here to a halt after lots of false begins.
“And it’s funny, because we started with fully autonomous vehicles,” shared the inventor. “And we’ve changed a lot, like a lot of pivots in that regard. … We’ve also worked with automakers for cars being sold on the road today with Level 2 autonomy, features like adaptive cruise control and lateral steering.”
“Things very much slowed down,” Lee added. “So we began working actually in the commercial vehicle space quite aggressively, probably about half a year back, and so we’ve seen a lot of traction there.”
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Meili Technologies finds product-market match
Rather than make investments large sums of cash in Level 5 autotech, Lee iterated to discover a product-market match with as we speak’s trucking fleets. She met with quite a few folks within the trade and listened to their wants.
“So we’ve moved into the commercial space, also providing safety systems there, where we’ve also found about 70% of commercial drivers have pre-existing [health] conditions, too,” defined Lee. “For the health emergency side of things, there’s a huge benefit there for not only saving lives, because when those trucks crash, they cause a lot of damage, but also helping the businesses in that space.”.
Her optimism for an aftermarket resolution that protects drivers is refreshing after so many high-profile autonomous trucking startups shuttering. They included Embark (a lack of $300 million), Uber Freight (a lack of $680 million), TuSimple (a lack of $775 million), and even Alphabet’s Waymo Via (losses undisclosed).
These closures got here at a time when the National Safety Council reported that enormous truck fatalities have elevated by near 50% previously 10 years, a promise that autonomy aimed to resolve.
How to develop data-driven autonomy
The key for Lee proper now’s buying the coaching knowledge to detect folks with medical situations and episodic occasions whereas driving, comparable to erratic respiratory, collapsed states, and/or disorientation.
“We’re actually doing sponsored research with leading hospitals in New York for heart-attack seizures and diabetic emergencies,” she famous.
Lee then continued to stipulate her proprietary knowledge assortment: “We have about 20 TB of normal driving data already. And we’re collecting more all the time with our test vehicle, but we’re also in the hospital space and actually collecting driving behavior, as well as health events that occur while they’re using our vehicle simulator.”
“It’s a very niche space where that data doesn’t really exist,” she acknowledged. “At this point, we’re really the first to collect en masse. You kind of have to go through the hospital in order to do it in a safe way.”
Lee shouldn’t be ready for her coaching knowledge to be full earlier than going to market with a smaller model of the autotech platform.
“We’ve done many pilots both in automotive, as well as the commercial space,” she mentioned. “The one we can talk about, as most of them are under NDAs [nondisclosure agreements], was our pilot with Stellantis. That was the demonstration you saw last year at CES, where we built our system with the ‘collapsed state’ understanding of incapacitated drivers in one of their Chrysler Pacificas.”
“And so we were showing the kind of responses we trigger like turning on hazard lights, having the vehicle come to a stop, and calling first responders,” mentioned Lee. “And what kind of data we would send to first responders.”
Meili follows go-to-market technique
Lee can be returning to CES this month on the COVESA showcase on the Bellagio on Jan. 9 demonstrating Meili’s new business fleet providing and expanded passenger automobile product. In explaining Meili’s present gross sales technique, Lee clarified how she is concentrated on driving income within the close to time period.
“We actually are selling off-the-shelf hardware components,” she mentioned. “We would like to eventually be software only, but for now, we’re doing this for go-to-market. And it includes things like understanding if somebody’s having a collapse state, we have that today, as well as, an understanding of those more broad safety systems like limbs outside of the vehicle and backing up incidents [for forklifts].”
As for the preliminary markets for these methods, Lee mentioned, “We began working actually in the commercial vehicle space quite aggressively, probably about half a year back, and we’ve seen a lot of traction there. We’re now a general operator focused on safety computer vision systems. We’ve also recently moved into the factory manufacturing distribution space.”
Meili’s early traction in enabling uncrewed automobiles comparable to forklifts and scissor lifts with imaginative and prescient security methods is an instance of the rising autotech trade exterior of the automobile and Valley startup ecosystem.
Meili Technologies will exhibit at CES 2024. Source: LinkedIn
Atlas Robotics a part of trucking development
The tenacity of roboticists exterior the Valley shouldn’t be restricted to New Yorkers. This previous September in Pittsburgh, Çetin Meriçli based autonomous forklift startup Atlas Robotics after years of working Locomation an autonomous trucking enterprise.
Similar to Lee, Meriçli is capitalizing on the large alternative pushed by the explosion of e-commerce success and logistics. According to Markets & Markets, uncrewed forklift know-how might develop to greater than $8 billion worldwide by 2028.
There are already two dozen corporations vying for market share on this house, many led by engineers previously designing autonomous driving methods. While the “trolley problem” continues to be being debated on the streets of San Francisco, these corporations (many situated exterior of the Bay space) are pushed by the promise of actual revenue.
This has even attracted the curiosity of Sandhill Road, with the $20 million funding of Austin’s Fox Robotics by BMW i Ventures, Zebra Technologies, and Autotech Ventures (backer of Lyft). This development is spilling over into extra {hardware} exits (through M&A exercise) exterior of Northern California, because the audacious ideas based pre-2021 are closing up store within the workplaces of Palo Alto and Menlo Park.
Forward-thinking West Coast funds are actually increasing east, most notably Eclipse VC, which employed a New York-based accomplice, Kaitlyn Glancy, this previous June.
Click right here to enlarge. Source: The Wall Street Journal
2024 might be the yr for sensor-based autotech
The buzz within the Big Apple has made Lee optimistic for 2024 as she predicted that sensor-based know-how will develop into ubiquitous throughout the trade.
“Technologies that enable driving could make us safer today, and even in a Level 5 world,” she predicted. “If you have an autonomous taxi one day, you need to know if people are actually in it, or you could have a big safety issue with other people getting in the vehicle if somebody else is there and they shouldn’t be.”
“Comfort is a big focus right now in passenger vehicles already on the road,” Lee added. “But that’s of course going to be even more important down the road with autonomous vehicles, making sure people have more relaxing environments.”
She reckoned that it will paved the way for a extra widespread autotech market over the following 10 to fifteen years.
“I’d love it to be on the road like tomorrow, and I’m optimistic,” mentioned Lee. “I just think public adoption takes a long time, and that’s going to be decades.”
Editor’s observe: Going to Manifest? Join me on my panel: “Alt Fuels – A Dive Into Scalability, Availability & Adaptability” on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024. The Robot Report editor Eugene Demaitre can be moderating a panel on “Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Supply Chain” on Tuesday, Feb. 6.