INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A new autonomous vehicle company is on the streets — and unbeknownst to most, has been since 2017
Unlike the majority in this burgeoning industry, this new entrant isn&t trying to launch a robotaxi service or sell a self-driving system to
It not aiming for autonomous delivery, either.
Ghost Locomotion, which emerged Thursday from stealth with $63.7 million in investment from
Keith Rabois at Founders Fund, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures and Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, is targeting your vehicle.
Ghost is
developing a kit that will allow privately owned passenger vehicles to drive autonomously on highways
And the company says it will deliver in 2020
A price has not been set, but the company says it will be less than what Tesla charges for its Autopilot package that includes &full
FSD currently costs $7,000.
This kit isn&t going to give a vehicle a superior advanced driving assistance system
The kit will let human drivers hand control of their vehicle over to a computer, allowing them to do other activities such as look at their
phone or even doze off.
The idea might sound similar to what Comma.ai is working on, Tesla hopes to achieve or even the early business model
Ghost CEO and co-founder John Hayes says what they&re doing is different.
A different approach
The biggest players in the industry —
companies like Waymo, Cruise, Zoox and Argo AI — are trying to solve a really hard problem, which is driving in urban areas, Hayes told
TechCrunch in a recent interview.
&It didn&t seem like anyone was actually trying to solve driving on the highways,& said Hayes, who
previously founded Pure Storage in 2009
&At the time, we were told that this is so easy that surely the automakers will solve this any day now
And that really hasn&t happened.&
Hayes noted that automakers have continued to make progress in advanced driver assistance systems
The more advanced versions of these systems provide what the SAE describes as Level 2 automation, which means two primary control functions
Tesla Autopilot system is a good example of this; when engaged, it automatically steers and has traffic-aware cruise control, which
maintains the car speed in relation to surrounding traffic
But like all Level 2 systems, the driver is still in the loop.
Ghost wants to take the human out of the loop when they&re driving on
highways.
&We&re taking, in some ways, a classic startup attitude to this, which is ‘what is the simplest product that we can perfect,
that will put self driving in the hands of ordinary consumers?& & Hayes said
&And so we take people existing cars and we make them self-driving cars.&
The kit
Ghost is tackling that challenge with software and
hardware.
The kit involves hardware like sensors and a computer that is installed in the trunk and connected to the controller area network
The CAN bus is essentially the nervous system of the car and allows various parts to communicate with each other.
Vehicles must have a CAN
bus and electronic steering to be able to use the kit.
The camera sensors are distributed throughout the vehicle
Cameras are integrated into what looks like a license plate holder at the back of the vehicle, as well as another set that are embedded
behind the rearview mirror.
A third device with cameras is attached to the frame around the window of the door (see below).
Initially,
this kit will be an aftermarket product; the company is starting with the 20 most popular car brands and will expand from there.
Ghost
intends to set up retail spaces where a car owner can see the product and have it installed
But eventually, Hayes said, he believes the kit will become part of the vehicle itself, much like GPS or satellite radio has evolved.
While
hardware is the most visible piece of Ghost, the company 75 employees have dedicated much of their time on the driving algorithm
It here, Hayes says, where Ghost stands apart.
How Ghost is building a driver
Ghost is not testing its self-driving system on public roads,
an approach nearly every other AV company has taken
There are 63 companies in California that have received permits from the Department of Motor Vehicles to test autonomous vehicle technology
(always with a human safety driver behind the wheel) on public roads.
Ghost entire approach is based on an axiom that the human driver is
It begins by collecting mass amounts of video data from kits that are installed on the cars of high-mileage drivers
Ghost then uses models to figure out what going on in the scene and combines that with other data, including how the person is driving by
measuring the actions they take.
It doesn&t take long or much data to model ordinary driving, actions like staying in a lane, braking and
changing lanes on a highway
But that doesn&t &solve& self-driving on highways because the hard part is how to build a driver that can handle the odd occurrences, such
as swerving, or correct for those bad behaviors.
Ghost system uses machine learning to find more interesting scenarios in the reams of data
it collects and builds training models based on them.
The company kits are already installed on the cars of high-mileage drivers like Uber
and Lyft drivers and commuters
Ghost has recruited dozens of drivers and plans to have its kits in hundreds of cars by the end of the year
By next year, Hayes says the kits will be in thousands of cars, all for the purpose of collecting data.
The background of the executive
team, including co-founder and CTO Volkmar Uhlig, as well as the rest of their employees, provides some hints as to how they&re approaching
the software and its integration with hardware.
Employees are data scientists and engineers, not roboticists
A dive into their resumes on LinkedIn and not one comes from another autonomous vehicle company, which is unusual in this era of talent
poaching.
For instance, Uhlig, who started his career at IBM Watson Research, co-founded Adello and was the architect behind the company
programmatic media trading platform
Before that, he built Teza Technologies, a high-frequency trading platform
While earning his PhD in computer science he was part of a team that architected the L4 Pistachio microkernel, which is commercially
deployed in more than 3 billion mobile Apple and Android devices.
If Ghost is able to validate its system — which Hayes says is baked into
its entire approach — privately owned self-driving cars could be on the highways by next year
While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could potentially step in, Ghost approach, like Tesla, hits a sweet spot of
It a space, that Hayes notes, where the government has not yet chosen to regulate.
