Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

Technology Gap
Driving Down
the Cost of Change
At last year’s Driverless Car Summit in Detroit,
Google’s Chris Urmson said the company’s selfdriving
cars have $150,000 of equipment on
board, including a $70,000 lidar. And while that price
for a prototype driverless car system created by a company
with nearly $11 billion in profits last year isn’t
worth a second glance, it would amount to sticker shock
for the average consumer already dropping a lot of cash
on a new car.
“Right now a lot of these systems are in the prototype
phase, and so the hardware that’s being purchased is either
a one- or two-off, low-volume [production] price,
so that adds up as you go through any vehicle outfit with
the required sensing technology, computing technology
and things like that,” says Ryan Lamm, manager of research
and development for intelligent vehicle systems
at Southwest Research Institute.
Southwest has first-hand experience in how to bring
down the cost of sensor technology. The research firm
is the prime contractor in the Navy’s Small Unit Mobility
Enhancement Technologies program, which aims
to make unmanned ground vehicle technology capable
yet also affordable. While Southwest Research Institute
doesn’t produce sensor hardware, it worked to develop
low-cost camera algorithms for vehicles that don’t rely
on GPS data. And though this program has a military
focus, Lamm says the concept translates to the driverless
car community.
“It actually translates quite well. ... A lot of the expertise
and a lot of the secret sauce really is the software. And so
the way we’ve developed a lot of the systems is to pretty
much be agnostic of sensors, to not be dependent on
specific types of platforms, to not be dependent on any
specific type of hardware.”
Like any other product, mass production will likely
shrink the cost of driverless car sensors, since it will
change how they are manufactured and also increase
competition, which also drives down cost. However,
Lamm says there are keys that will also enable software
prices to remain low, like keeping nonrecurring costs
down through use of an extensible software framework.
“Our philosophy is always that the software should be
very modular, scalable and extensible so that you don’t
The SUMET EV-1 vehicle, which can
navigate autonomously in harsh terrain.
Photo courtesy Southwest Research Institute.
have to redo a lot of software when you want to add
additional levels of autonomy or make changes to your
hardware,” he says.
Through this approach to making autonomy software,
the cost of updates is “essentially free” after you’ve developed
the initial framework, says Lamm.
However, Southwest Research Institute isn’t a for-profit
corporation trying to sell shrink-wrapped autonomy
software. Many companies do license their software for
royalties, just like how personal computer users pay for
adding software to their systems. A model like this could
mean that the overall cost of going driverless would be
higher.
Modular, scalable software development also allows
companies to keep up with Moore’s Law — the concept
that the rate of computing power change over short time
intervals is exponential.
“One of the key goals of all the work that we’ve done at
[Southwest Research Institute], including some of the
internally funded work that we’ve done, is to look at
what’s possible to eliminate dependence on expensive,
vendor-proprietary solutions,” says Lamm. “We don’t
build our systems around specific types of vehicles and
what have you. By being extensible, what that does is it
effectively takes the software cost factor, for slight modification
or enhancements, out of the equation. So really
then what you’re dependent upon in the end is the cost
of the hardware.”
The ultimate driver of price, however, is still the consumer.
“What we’ve seen in the auto market is safety is a
difficult sell,” says Lamm. “If you’re going to buy a new
car, if you have the option for an entertainment package
versus a special additional safety system, it’s likely that
the end consumer will choose the entertainment package
over the safety system. … This is a feature that’s going
to cost several thousand dollars, possibly, and is the
public willing to pay that the next time they go out and
buy their next car Or is the convenience, the mobility
aspect of being able to be distracted while you’re sitting
in your vehicle, is that worth that cost to you It’ll be
interesting to see how the market evolves.”
MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013 13