YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Urmson

lines on the record: 131
first: 2017-09-04
most recent: 2017-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Gone it went. Yeah Yeah, that was kind of the end of that for them. And then the cars from Cornell and MIT were in the competition. They both did incredibly well, but they had the first kind of robot-robot crash, of course. So that was.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, everybody got to bring their own There was another one where a car didn't see one of these kind of fold over gates and drove into it and basically the gate decapitated these veladine lasers, you know, the spinning red chicken things, right? It just drove into it and...”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No huge mishaps. There were some entertaining things. One of the vehicles literally drove into a building. Oh, fun. Yeah. And it was a big truck. It was one of these big military trucks and it drove into the building.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it had to deal with other traffic. So the ones across the desert, they made sure nothing was moving near the vehicles. This last one, the urban challenge, they had stunt drivers out there bringing traffic into it and falling the vehicles around. And the vehicles themselves had to interact with one another. So if two of them came to a four-way intersection with stop signs, They had to stop and take turns. And kind of, if you squinted, you could kind of see the future, right? This was very cool.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And So, the third one, it was 60 miles driving around on roads. Miles an hour an hour. No, 60 miles of distance. It ended up, you know, it was probably between 30 and 40 miles per hour, it was”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so it was that first challenge where no one won. The second challenge happened and a number of vehicles actually finished and this was a year later. There was a third challenge, which this time was at an air base, and it was driving on roads, and it was much closer to what we're doing today. No pedestrians, no cyclists, no traffic lights, but the basics of it. And that was in 2007. And that was the last of the DARPA challenges. And it was exciting and fun. That one, the team I was the technical director for ended up winning.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because again, Disappointingly, it seemed cool. And that's really all the backstory, right? You know, having spent time walking very slowly behind a robot in the desert in Chile, the idea that you could have a robot instead of moving at walking speed, move faster than I could run and drive through a desert.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really cool The idea that you could actually have a robot do something meaningful, right? There had been robotics had made it into manufacturing. And obviously there were space exploration robots. But there wasn't really robots in people's everyday life, and there wasn't a way they could have an impact. And I wouldn't claim that at the time. could kind of see the future and see what's transpiring now in the industry. But at the time it was very much this is a way to help the military and get young men and women out of harm's way, particularly moving supplies to the front line, which is part of their job.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My attention, I was like, This way. So, a lot of people do start in robotics. They do start before they're doing this. What moved you into car? Because you did this car because you did this. It was just the DARPA had this challenge.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went into computer engineering. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, Nortel Networks was a big thing in Canada. It was hiring and it seemed like that could be fun. And then, like I said, this poster just caught my attention. I was like,”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, a lot of failure, yeah I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I went to college, up until the last minute, I was debating between going into medicine and engineering. And at some point, I realized I really didn't like the sight of blood. And that seemed to kind of gross. That's an issue. And I was like, maybe I should do engineering.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The guys who went behind us had a much smaller vehicle. And so it was really good for them that we took the fence post out because they were right in our tire tracks and would have driven right into the fence post and probably not broken them.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. It got off the side of the road and high centered, and it was trying really hard before, didn't realize it was stuck, so just spin the wheels harder and harder and the tires were melted and big clouds of smoke.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cool. Cool. And that was all you could see as it went into the sagebrush. And so it charges off into the desert. And that was all we knew until... A little later in the day, seven and a half miles into the 150 mile course, basically a burs into flames.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we're No, they. There was some rumor that they had people around in case one of them went crazy, but no, they just had a little remote e-stop for it. And so this thing, you know, we're stood off the side and off it goes charging into the desert. And it had this giant fin on the top.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was completely by itself. They had somebody from the government was chasing it in a pickup truck, and they had just one button that could basically kill.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of them didn't work that well. Ours ended up working the best. We got it out to the race course, set off in the morning, and it was just magnificent, right? This is, we'd been working on this for a year and a half, and this was kind of the first time we let it loose in the desert.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got to put back together. We took to the competition. It was kind of like robot woodstock, right? There was all kinds of different things there from something inspired by centipedes to little ATVs, to our big Humphy and everything in between.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It rolled itself over. This was, you know, we wanted to 150 mile test and we were going to do it at 30 miles an hour and that takes five hours where we said, okay, well, why don't we do it at 50 miles an hour? Because that would take three hours. That seems better than taking five hours. Was a bad decision. Right. Yeah, a little too fast, and it ended up getting off the road and rolling.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be pretty cute. She and the little Asimo robot. No, I'm thinking Terminator. Yeah, that would be creepy. So we got this thing, we got it out to the desert. We tested it a bunch. It turns out 10 days before the race, we rolled it over during testing. Oh, that was disappointing. Wow. Did you work?”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, honestly, at the time, it wasn't obvious that it was doable, right? Nobody had done it before. Right. And in fact, people thought that it was not solvable. At least in the year and a half or year, whatever it was that we had. And it turns out they were right. We had a bunch of graduate students and undergraduates, and we took a Humvee and tore it apart and put lasers and radars and stuff on it.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were out in the middle of the desert testing this thing, and there was a dozen engineers. Most of the time, it didn't work. We were experimenting and playing with it and fixing it. And that was when this DARPA challenge got announced. And the idea was to build A robot that could drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas across the desert And to do that, which isn't very hard.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went there and I spent a number of years working on NASA projects. And just before the grand challenges, which were these big robot races out the desert, I was part of a project that was testing a robot down in the Atacama Desert in Chile. And so we had this little four wheeled robot. It was called Hyperion. It was really, you know, it was a cute robot and it would move around at 15 centimeters a second to 30 centimeters a second, which is like a slow walk to a slightly less slow walk of speed”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or just the concept? That's the idea that you There's something really appealing about technology that you can kind of touch. And with robots, it was still everyone's seen them in the movies, whether it's R2D2 and C3PO or what have you. They don't really exist. And so the chance to kind of go and work on that, and this was a place that was doing it that seemed really exciting.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I build little robot things out of Lego and had fun with that. And at some point, while I was doing my undergraduate degree, I saw a poster for this robot crawling out of a volcano. And I said, that looks really cool. You know, that would be fun to go do.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the kind of thing we were shooting for, right? We wanted your experience in the first time you're in a truly self-driving car to be not scary, to be friendly, to be fun.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we'll get more into that concept at the time, but it was really cool. It was sort of like being in a Disney ride or something like that. That's what it felt like because it was small and adorable and stuff like that.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. You just tell where you want to go, and it takes you there. And so you get to think differently about the interior of the car. You had to think differently about what people want to do in the car. And that was part of the exercise in developing the vehicle.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, okay, I Yeah, so that was a car that we built from the ground up at Google. And the goal behind it was, one, to learn what it meant to integrate the software and the sensors into a car. And then the other was to have the first shot at having a car that was designed to be a self-driving car. And what do you want that vehicle to look like so it can be a good avatar for the technology in the community? And what experience do you want people to have in it? And what was fascinating was just how much extra space there was and how. There's”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, okay. I call it Clown Car, but explain that we showed it off at the Code Conference a couple years ago for the first time, but I came out there and Liz Gaines and I got in it and explain that car because that was different from the others we had done.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I think we'd go buy them off the dealership and then we'd put lasers and radars and cameras on them, add our software to them and go and test them out on the roads. Right.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT