Apple Permit Reveals Self-Driving Car Testers With NASA Experience
April 24 2017 - 10:35AM
Dow Jones News
By Tripp Mickle and Tim Higgins
Apple Inc.'s plan for autonomous vehicles calls for putting
more-senior engineers in all of its cars than some of its rivals
are using for road tests, a move that suggests the company is still
in the early phases of testing its technology, analysts say.
In a permit issued April 14 by the state of California, obtained
Friday through a public-records request, Apple identifies six
employees, including roboticists who worked at the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, who will be in the front seat
of three Lexus sport-utility vehicles outfitted with technology to
make them autonomous.
The road tests are critical for Apple as it tries to catch up in
the race to develop self-driving cars. Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo has
been testing autonomous vehicles on roads since 2009, with senior
engineers in the front seat for many early tests.
At stake is a reshuffling of the auto industry and the $2
trillion in annual revenue tied to it, according to estimates by
Deloitte. Traditional auto makers such as Ford Motor Co. and
General Motors Co., as well as Silicon Valley companies such as
Uber Technologies Inc. and Tesla Inc., are investing heavily in
self-driving technology.
Though Apple has been working since at least 2014 on
self-driving cars -- an effort dubbed Project Titan -- it has been
guarded publicly about people working on the project.
Shilpa Gulati, the first person named on the Apple permit, has
been in the field since at least 2009, when she was part of a team
working in Antarctica on a NASA-funded project to develop an
autonomous vehicle to explore one of Jupiter's moons.
She later worked on self-driving cars at Robert Bosch GmbH, a
German technology and auto-parts supplier. According to her
LinkedIn page, she is a manager working on special projects at a
"Silicon Valley company," where she built a team of about 30
researchers and engineers.
The permit also names three engineers who worked at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory: Paul Hebert, who has designed a robot that
could unlock a door; Jeremy Ma, who focused on algorithms for
detecting three-dimensional objects; and Victor Hwang, who has
worked on motion-planning algorithms for robots, according to their
LinkedIn pages, which list them as working at Apple.
Rivals such as Waymo and Uber have more vehicles on the road
than Apple. Waymo, for example, mainly relies on technicians for
testing, industry watchers say. For Apple, keeping engineers close
to the technology could allow them to make quicker improvements,
said Jeremy Carlson, an automotive analyst with research firm IHS
Markit.
Apple declined to comment on its autonomous-driving plans or
employees named in the document. The drivers named in the permit
didn't reply to requests for comment.
The employees named in the permit are among an estimated 1,000
people working on Project Titan, according to people familiar with
the effort. Their experience in robotics and camera vision from
their work on space programs would be valuable to a self-driving
program. Ms. Gulati, for example, has researched making autonomous
wheelchairs move more gracefully, work that would be applicable in
a car program.
"The fundamental problems of controlling a wheelchair overlap a
great deal with the fundamental problems of controlling a car,"
said Benjamin Kuipers, the University of Michigan professor who
oversaw Ms. Gulati's wheelchair research when she was a Ph.D.
student at the University of Texas.
Hiring experts with self-driving car experience has become
fiercely competitive and expensive in recent years. Sebastian
Thrun, the so-called godfather of Google's self-driving car
project, created a stir last fall when he told Recode that
experienced autonomous-vehicle researchers were valued at $10
million each, based on GM's acquisition of Cruise Automation Inc.,
which had about 40 employees, and Uber's acquisition of Ottomotto
LLC, which had about 70 employees.
Ms. Gulati brought to Apple her experience in robotics and time
spent at a key automotive supplier. A graduate of the prestigious
Indian Institute of Technology, she went from working on the
NASA-funded Jupiter project to joining a Bosch team that developed
algorithms for a car that could drive on highways, her personal
website says.
In a 2013 Bosch marketing video, she is featured riding in a BMW
car retrofitted with sensors and computers to make it drive
autonomously.
Apple listed Bosch for the first time as one of its top 200
suppliers in 2016 and included an address for a Bosch facility
focused on automotive electronics and mobility solutions.
The permit also includes a 10-page training plan for test
drivers, outlining moments when they might need to take control of
a vehicle on the road. Each driver is given two practice runs and
three trials to pass tests such as responding to a vehicle's rapid
acceleration by tapping the brakes.
Write to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com and Tim Higgins at
Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 24, 2017 10:20 ET (14:20 GMT)
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