YouSaid · the spoken record

Dmitri Dolgov

lines on the record: 133
first: 2020-12-20
most recent: 2020-12-20
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

“Passenger, his name was Steve Mann, a great friend of our project from the early days. The man happens to be blind, so we put him in that vehicle. The car had no steering wheel, no pedals. It was an uncontrolled environment, no lead or chase cars, no police escorts. And we did that trip a few times in Austin, Texas. So that was a really big milestone.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The early days was not. I think it was in 2013, maybe that became very clear and we made that pivot. And it also became very clear that the way you go building a driver system is fundamentally different from how you go building a fully driverless vehicle. So we've pivoted towards the latter. And that's what we've been working on ever since. And so that was around 2013. There's a sequence of really meaningful for us, really important defining milestones since then. And 20... We had our first, actually the world's first fully driverless ride on public roads. It was in a custom built vehicle that we had. You must have seen those. We called them the Firefly, that funny looking marshmallow looking thing. And we put”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a really interesting journey. And Waymo came a little bit later. Then we completed those milestones in 2010. That was the pivot when we decided to focus on actually building a product using this technology. The initial couple years after that, we were focused on a freeway, what you would call a driver assist, maybe an L3 driver assist program. Then around 2013, we've learned enough about the space and thought more deeply about the product that we wanted to build that we pivoted. We pivoted towards this vision of building a driver and deploying it fully driverless vehicles without a person. And that's the path that we've been on since then. And exactly the right decision for us.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A ton. The most important one is probably that we believe that it's doable. And we've gotten far enough into the problem that we had, I think only a glimpse of the true complexity. the domain it's a little bit like you know climbing a mountain where you kind of you know see the next peak and you think that's kind of the summit but then you get to that and you kind of see that that this is just the start of the journey but we've tried we've sampled enough of the problem space and we've made enough rapid success even you know with technology of 2009-2010 that it gave us confidence to then you know pursue this as a real product”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took us under two. I guess that speaks to a really big difference between doing something once and having a prototype. Where you are going after learning about the problem versus how you go about engineering a product where you look at, do you properly do evaluation? You look at metrics, you drive off, and you're confident that you can do that a hundred. And I guess that's why it took a dozen people. 16 months or a little bit more than that back in 2009 and 2010 with the technology of the more than a decade ago that amount of time to achieve that milestone of 10 routes 100 miles each and no interventions and Us a little bit longer to get to a full driverless product that customers use.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work on, and it took us just under two years, about a year and a half, a little bit more, to finish both of these milestones. And in that process, A, it was an incredible amount of fun, probably the most fun I had in my professional career. And you're just learning so much. You are, the goal here is to learn and prototype. You're not yet starting to build a production system, right? So you are, you know, this is when you're kind of working 24-7 and hacking things together.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were specifically chosen to be kind of extra spicy, extra complicated and sample the full complexity of that domain. And you had to drive each one from beginning to end with no intervention, no human intervention. So you would get to the beginning of the course. You would press the button that included engage autonomy. And you had to go for 100 miles beginning to end with no interventions. Some were on freeways. We had one route that went all through all the freeways and all the bridges in the Bay Area. We had some that went around Lake Tahoe and kind of mountains roads. We had some that drove through dense urban environments like in downtown Palo Alto and through San Francisco. So it was incredibly interesting.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're up against. And with that goal in mind, when we started the project, we created a few milestones for ourselves that Maximized learnings. The two milestones were one was to drive 100,000 miles in autonomous mode, which was at that time orders of magnitude that more than anybody has ever done. And the second milestone was to drive 10 routes, each one was 100 miles long.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you're right. The urban challenge and the previous Darby Grand challenges. Kind of led, I think, to a very large degree to that next step. And Larry and Sergei, Larry Page and Sergei Brand, Google Honderscore, saw that competition and believed in the technology. So the Google self-driving car project was born. At that time, and we started in 2009, it was a pretty small group of us, about a dozen people who came together to work on this project at Google. At that time, we saw that incredible early result in the DARPA urban challenge. I think we're all incredibly excited about where we got to. And we believed in the future of the technology, but we still had a very rudimentary understanding of the problem space. So the first goal of this project in 2009 was to really better understand”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point and exit the level, and off they would go our car on the hand, which hit the checkpoint, and then it would do an extra lap around the oval, and only then leave and go in its merry way. So over the course of the full day, it accumulated some extra time. And the problem was that we had a bug where it wouldn't start reasoning about the next waypoint and plan around to get to that next point until it hit a previous one. And in that particular case, by the time you hit that one, it was too late for us to consider the next one and kind of make a lane change. So every time it would do like an extra lap. The Stanford victory lap.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rule of the competition. And you know, I have my own opinion here. In terms of other bugs, and like I have to apologize to Mike Montemera for sharing this on air, but it is actually one of the more memorable ones. And it's something that's kind of become a bit of a metaphor in the industry since then. I think at least in some circles, it's called the victory circle or victory lab. Our cars did that. And one of the missions in the urban challenge and one of the courses, there was this big oval right by the start and finish of the race. So the DARPA had a lot of the missions would finish in that same location. And it was pretty cool because you could see the cars come by, you know, kind of finish that part leg of the trip, that leg of the mission, and then go on the rest of it. And other vehicles would come hit their way.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our interpretation, or at least my interpretation of the rules, was that you had to reverse out of the parking spot. And that's what our cars did, even if there's no optical in front. That's not what seam used car did. And it just kind of drove right through. So there's still a debate. And of course, if you stop and then reverse out and go at the different way, that costs you some time. So there's still a debate whether, you know, it was my poor implementation that cost us extra time or whether it was CMU violating.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PSA. So in the part that I contributed to, which was navigating parking lots and the way that part of the mission worked is you in a parking lot, you would get from DARPA an outline of the mapping piece, you can get this giant polygon that defined the perimeter of the parking lot. And that would be an entrance. And so maybe multiple entrances or access to it. And then you would get a goal within that open space XY heading where the car had to park. It had no information about the optical obstacles that the car might encounter there. So it had to navigate kind of completely free space from the entrance to the parking lot into that parking space. And then once parked there, it had to exit the parking lot while, of course, encountering and reasoning about all the obstacles that it encountered. In real time.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the race, and then you know, DARPA sends them on their mission one by one, something leave. And they had these sirens, they all had their different silence, right? Each siren had its own personality, if you will. So, you know, off the go and you don't see them. And then every once in a while, they come a little bit closer to where the audience is. And you can kind of hear the sound of your car. And, you know, it seems to be moving along so that, you know, gives you hope. And then it goes away and you can't hear it for too long. You start getting anxious, right? So it's a little bit like sending your kids to college and like, you know, kind of you invested in them. You hope you build it properly, but it's still anxiety-inducing. So that was an incredibly fun few days. In terms of bugs, as you mentioned, one that was my bug that caused us the loss of the first place. Is there still a debate that I occasionally have with people on the CMU team CMU came first?”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was, of course, very buggy at the time and had all kinds of problems, but it was pretty darn magical. I remember going back and late at night trying to fall asleep and just being unable to fall asleep for the rest of the night. My mind was blown. And that's what I've been doing ever since for more than a decade. In terms of challenges and interesting memories, like on the day of the competition, it was pretty nerve-wrecking. I remember standing there with Mike Monte Merlo, who was the software elite and wrote most of the code. I did one little part of the planner, Mike, you know, incredibly pretty much the rest of it with a bunch of other incredible people. But I remember standing on the day of the competition, watching the car with Mike, and cars are completely empty, right? They're all there lined up in the beginning.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely a very memorable time. Not really a challenge, but one of the most vivid memories that I have from the time, and I think that was actually one of the days that really got me hooked on this whole field was The first time I got to run my software on the car and I was working on a part of our planning algorithm that had to navigate in parking lots. So it was something that called free space motion planning. So the very first version of that we tried on the car. It was on Stanford's campus in the middle of the night and had this little course constructed with cones in the middle of a parking lot. So we're there in like 3 a.m. by the time.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came in second. Perhaps that was my contribution to the team. I think the Stanford team came in first in the DARPA challenge. But then I joined the team and you were the one with the bug in the code.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a mission, so there's a crude map that they received at the beginning and they had a mission here and then there and over here. And they kind of all were sharing this environment at the same time they had to interact with each other. They had to interact with the human drivers. So it's this very first, very rudimentary version of a self-driving car that could operate in an environment shared with other dynamic actors that, as you said, really many ways kickstarted this whole industry.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure, sure. So the way the challenge was constructed in just a little bit of backgrounding, as I mentioned, this was the third competition in that series. The first two were the grand channel called the Grand Challenge. The goal there was to just drive in a completely static environment. You had to drive in a desert that was very successful. So then DARPA followed with what they called the urban challenge, where the goal was to build vehicles that could operate in more dynamic environments and share them with other vehicles. There were no pedestrians there. But what DARPA did is they took over an abandoned Air Force base. And it was kind of like a little fake city that they built out there. And they had a bunch of robots, cars that were autonomous in there. All at the same time, mixed in with other vehicles driven by professional drivers. And each car”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the great fortune and great honor to join Stanford's DARPA Urban Challenge team in 2006. This was a third in the sequence of the DARPA challenges. There were two grand challenges prior to that and 2007. They held the DARPA urban challenge. So I was doing my postdoc I had. I joined the team and worked on motion planning for that competition.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was interesting, you know, definitely fairly hardcore on the fundamentals of math and physics and lots of good memories from those times.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supportive of that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, it was your previous question they supported me in letting me pursue my passions and the things that I was a bold move.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went back there, yeah. Wow, exactly the reaction most of my peers and college had, but perhaps a little bit stronger. Point me out as this crazy kid.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. Six years. I got my bachelor's and master's in physics and math there. And it's actually interesting because my dad, actually both my parents went there. And I think all the stories that I heard, like just like you, Alex, growing up about the place and how interesting and special and magical it was, I think that was a significant maybe the main reason I wanted to go there for college. Enough so that I actually went back to Russia from the US. I graduated high school in the US.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To robotics. That happened later. That was after grad school. After, and actually, they were self driving cars, was I think my first real hands on introduction to robotics. But I never really had that much hands-on experience at school and training. I worked on applied math and physics. Then in college, I did more abstract computer science. And it was after grad school that I really got involved in robotics. I was actually self-driving cars. That was a big bit flip. Someone to grad school in Michigan, and then I did a postdoc at Stanford, which was the postdoc where I got to play with several cars.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So less of the time. Maybe it was my deep infatuation with the traffic control batons that led to this career.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a traffic control cop, you know, they don't have those todays, I think, but back in the 80s in Russia, you probably are familiar with that, Lex. They had these police officers that would stand in the middle of an intersection all day and they would have their striped black and white batons that they would use to control the flow of traffic. And for whatever reason, I was strangely infatuated with this whole process. And that was my dream. That's what I wanted to do when I grew up. And my parents, both physics profs, by the way, I think were a little concerned with that level of ambition coming from their child at that age.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm tempted to make something up about robots. Engineering, or mysteries of the universe, but that's not the actual memory that pops into my mind when you ask me about childhood dreams. So I'll actually share the real thing. When I was maybe four or five years old, I, you know, as we all do, I thought about what I wanted to do when I grow up. And I had this dream of”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever brings you joy, right? Minecraft, right? Minecraft is a great example. Create, like, it's not the fancy graphics, but it's the creation of your own worlds.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Text based, yeah, yeah, it was like, I think 300, 320 by 200, whatever it was. I think the earlier VGA resolution, right? And I actually think the reason why this company wanted to buy it is not like the fancy graphics or the implementation. It was maybe the idea.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was not the most acute financial move that I made in my life. Looking back at it now, I instead put it, well, I had a reason. I put it online. It was, what do you call it back in the days? It was a freeware, I think. It was not open source, but you could upload the binaries, you would put the game online, and the idea was that people like it, and then they contribute and they send you a little donations, right? So I did my quick math of like, you know, of course, thousands and millions of people are going to play my game, send me a couple bucks apiece. I should definitely do that. As I said, not the best finder. You're already playing this.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that was the five. I don't know. Maybe before that was the giant plates, then it didn't get that. But it was definitely not the three inch ones. Anyway, so we got that computer. I spent the first few months just playing video games, as you would expect. I got bored of that, so I started messing around and trying to figure out how to make the thing do other stuff got into exploring programming. And a couple of years later, I got to a point where I actually wrote a game, a lot of game, and a game developer, a Japanese game developer, actually offered to buy it for me for a few hundred bucks, but for a kid in Russia. That's a big deal. That's a big deal, yeah. I did not take the deal.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General Computer Science First at a fairly young age. Robotics happened much later. I think my first interesting introduction to computers was in the late 80s when we got our first computer. I think an IBM, I think IBM IT. Do you remember those things that had like a Turba button in the front? The radio press and make the thing goes faster.”
2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source