YouSaid · the spoken record

Kyle Vogt

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70
first
2019-02-07
most recent
2019-02-07
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1
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  1. “I'd say at that point in time it was a Curiosity, as in is this really possible? And I think that was generally the spirit and the purpose of that original DARPA Grand Challenge, which was to just get a whole bunch of really brilliant people exploring the space and pushing the limits. And I think to this day, that DARPA challenge with its million dollar prize pool was probably one of the most effective uses of taxpayer money, dollar for dollar that I've seen, you know, because that small sort of initiative that Darfo put out sort of, in my view, was the catalyst or the tipping point for”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Started meeting and got together and tried to haggle together some sponsorships. We got a vehicle donated, a bunch of sensors, and tried to put something together. And so we had our team was probably mostly freshmen and sophomores, you know, which was not really a fair fight against maybe the... Postdoc and faculty led teams from other schools. But we got something up and running. We had our vehicle drive by wire and very, very basic control and things. On the day of the qualifying Pre qualifying round. The one and only steering motor that we had purchased, the thing that we had retrofitted to turn the steering wheel on the truck, Died, and so our vehicle was just dead in the water, couldn't steer. So we didn't make it very far.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Originally, there wasn't an official entry, yeah, faculty sponsored thing. And so a bunch of undergrads, myself included.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I've always wanted to start a company. I think that's just a cool concept of creating something and exchanging it for value or creating value, I guess. So in high school, I was trying to build like, you know, servo motor drivers, little circuit boards, and sell them online or other things like that. And certainly knew at some point I wanted to do a startup, but it wasn't really, I'd say, until college until I felt like I had the. The right combination of the environment, the smart people around you, and some free time and a lot of free time at MIT.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I can only imagine if your starting point is Python and TensorFlow at age 13, where you end up after 10 or 15 years of that, that's pretty cool.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Because that's the thing I knew at the time. And so there was no chance at all of us, no computational power to do any sort of reasonable deep nets like you have today. So I don't know what kids these days are doing. Are kids these days at age 13 using neural networks in their garage? I mean, that would be awesome.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And I think you can. I mean, if you wanted to do a full, I was just trying to make something that would stay in between the lanes on a highway. But if you wanted to do the full. The full set of capabilities needed for a driverless car, I think you could, and we've done this at Cruise in the very first days, you can start off with a really simple human written heuristic just to get the scaffolding in place for your system, traffic light detection, probably a really simple color thresholding on day one just to get the system up and running before you migrate to a deep learning-based technique or something else. And, you know, back in when I was doing this, my first one was on a Pinium 233 megahertz computer. It and I think I wrote the first version in basic, which is like an interpreted language, it's extremely slow.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, prior to deep neural networks or convolutional neural analyses, modern techniques we have, or at least ones that are in use today, it was all a heuristic space. And so old school image processing. And I think extracting yellow lane markers out of an image of a road is one of the problems that lends itself reasonably well to those heuristic-based methods. Like just do a threshold on the color yellow and then try to fit some lines to that using a huff transform or something and then go from there”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Not where I went. So I was self-taught, but I did a lot of programming. The thing that Know, sort of push me in the path of eventually working on self driving cars is actually one of these really long trips driving from my house in Kansas to I think Las Vegas where we did the Battle Bots competition and I had just gotten my I think my learner's permit or early driver's permit and so I was driving this you know 10 hour stretch across western Kansas where it's just you're going straight on a highway and it is mind-numbingly boring and I remember thinking even then with my sort of mediocre programming background that this is something that a computer can do right let's take a picture of the road let's find the yellow lane markers and you know steer the wheel and you know later I'd come to realize this had been done you know since the 80s or the 70s or even earlier but I still wanted to do it and sort of immediately after that trip switched from sort of battle bots which is more radio controlled machines to thinking about building you know autonomous”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, go to very basic, maybe hence the name, but. Lot of fun. And that was like, that was when, you know, when you first program, you see the magic of it. It's like this world opens up with, you know, endless possibilities for the things you could build or accomplish with that computer.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “She had no interest in that, so it wasn't until I think about fifth grade that I had a school where you could actually go on these Apple IIIs and learn to program. And so it was all in basic, you know, where every line, you know, the line numbers, every line is numbered. And you have to leave enough space between the numbers so that if you want to tweak your code, you go back. And if the first line was 10 and the second line is 20, now you have to go back and insert 15. If you need to add code in front of that, you know, 11 or 12, and you hope you don't run out of line numbers and have to redo the whole thing.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, well, I remember, I think maybe when I was in third or fourth grade, the school I was at elementary school had a bunch of Apple II computers and we played games on those. And I remember every once in a while something would crash or it wouldn't start up correctly and it would dump you out to what I later learned was like sort of a command prompt. And my teacher would come over and type. I actually remember this to this day for some reason, like PR number six or PR pound six, which is peripheral six, which is the disk drive, which would fire up the disk and load the program. And I just remember thinking, wow, she's like a hacker. Like, teach me these codes, these error codes is what I called him at the time.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, it was just to try to poke holes in the other robot. And then the second time I did it, which is the following, I think maybe 18 months later. We had, well, a titanium axe with a hardened steel tip on it that was powered by a hydraulic cylinder, which we were activating with liquid CO2, which had its own set of problems.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The one I built first, both of them were these wedge-shaped robots because the wedge, even though it's sort of boring to look at, is extremely effective, you drive towards another robot and the front edge of it gets under them, and then they sort of flip over, kind of like a doorstopper. And the first one had a pneumatic polished stainless steel spike on the front that would shoot out about eight inches.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I mean, that was just building something. I think the idea of this radio-controlled machine that can do various things, if it has a weapon or something was pretty interesting, I agree it doesn't have the same appeal as autonomous robots, which I sort of gravitated towards later on. But it was definitely an engineering challenge because everything you did in that competition was pushing components to their limits. So we would buy these $40 DC motors that came out of a winch on the front of a pickup truck or something. And we'd power the car with those and we'd run them at like double or triple their rated voltage. So they immediately start overheating. But for that two minute match, you can get, you know, a significant increase in the power output of those motors before they burn out. And so you're doing the same thing for your battery packs, all the materials in the system. And I think there is something intrinsically interesting about just seeing like.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “They're radio controlled, so and I think that they allowed some limited form of autonomy. But in a two-minute match, and the way these things ran, you're really doing yourself a disservice by trying to automate it versus just do the practical thing, which is drive it yourself.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Some of these things together and ended up doing battle bots, which was, you know, it was like 13 or 14, which was pretty awesome.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I think I've been trying to figure this out for a while, but I've always liked building things with Legos. And when I was really, really young, I wanted the Legos. I had motors and other things. And then Lego mindstorms came out. And for the first time, you could program Lego contraptions. And I think things just sort of snowballed from that. But I remember seeing the Battlebots TV show on Comedy Central and thinking that is the coolest thing in the world. I want to be a part of that and not knowing a whole lot about how to build these 200 pound fighting robots. So I sort of obsessively poured over the internet forums where all the creators for BattleBots would sort of hang out and talk about document their build progress and everything. And I think I read, I must have read like, you know, tens of thousands of forum posts from basically everything that was out there on what these people were doing. And eventually triangulated how to put”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I was trying to look super cool and intense. You did because you know this was Battle Bots. This is serious business. Standing there with a welded steel frame and looking tough.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “That's right. That was the only high school in the area that had a teacher who was willing to sponsor a first robotics team.”

    2019-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source