YouSaid · the spoken record

Sertac Karaman

lines on the record: 97
first: 2020-05-20
most recent: 2020-05-20
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

“P inside this place within that day, they use their cars. And so we end up building more parking Them to, for example, take their cars and go to a lunch place. And I think that one of the things that can be done is that you can put in efficient, safe, sustainable transportation systems into these types of places first. And I think that you could deliver mobility in an affordable way, affordable, accessible, sustainable way. But I think what also it enables is that this kind of effort, money area, land that we spend on parking, you could reclaim some of that. And that is on the order of like even for a small environment like two mile by two mile, it doesn't have to be smack in the middle of New York.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the first places that I like to target, honestly, is like these places where transportation is required within an environment, like people typically call it geoffensed. So you can imagine like roughly two mile by two mile could be bigger, could be smaller type of an environment. And there's a lot of these kinds of environments that are typically transportation deprived. The Brooklyn Aviard that we're in today, we're in a few different places, but that was the one that was last publicized. That's a good example. So there's not a lot of transportation there. And you wouldn't expect like, I don't know, I think maybe operating an Uber there ends up being sort of a little too expensive. Or when you compare it with operating Uber elsewhere, that becomes the elsewhere becomes the priority. And these people, those places become totally transportation deprived. And then what happens is that, you know, people drive into these places. And to go from point A to point.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you get used to that, and one day your car actually drives itself and the regulation goes by and you can hit the button asleep. And it wouldn't be a surprise at all. I think that may be the reality.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people kind of don't see that. I sincerely think that there's a possibility that we may almost see like a whole mushrooming of this technology in all kinds of places that we didn't expect before. And then maybe the real surprise. And then one day when your car actually drives itself, it may not be all that much of a surprise at all because you see it all the time. You interact with them. You take the optimist ride, hopefully that's your choice. And then you hear a bunch of things. You go around, you interact with them. I don't know like you have a little delivery vehicle that goes around the sidewalks and delivers you things and you take it. It says thank you.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you think about what really happens is that something comes in in a way that you didn't even expect. If asked, you might have said, I don't think I need that, or I don't think it should be that, and so on. And then that becomes the next big thing, code and code. And so I think that this kind of different ways of humans operating vehicles could be really powerful. I think that sooner than later, we might open our eyes up to a world in which you go around walking a mall. and there's a bunch of security robots that are exactly operated in this way. You go into a factory or a warehouse, there's a whole bunch of robots that are putting exactly in this way. You go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, you see a whole bunch of autonomous vehicles optimum's ride. And they're operated maybe in this way.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I can wait, I can inch forward a little bit, show my intent, or I can turn left. And right now it's clear. I can't turn. I know that. But before you give me the go, I won't. And so that's one example. This doesn't mean necessarily we're doing that, actually. I think if you go down that much detail that every intersection, you're kind of expecting a person to press a button, then I don't think you'll get the efficiency benefits you want. You need to be able to kind of go around and be able to do these things. But I think you need people to be able to set high level behavior to vehicles. That's the other thing with autonomous vehicles. I think a lot of people kind of think about it as follows. I mean, this happens with technology a lot. You know, you think, all right, so I know about cars and I heard robots. So I think how this is going to work out is that I'm going to buy a car, press a button, and it's going to drive itself. And when is that going to happen? People kind of tend to think about it that way.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so these AV controllers would actually see a whole map, and they would understand why vehicles are really confident and where they kind of need a little bit more help. And the help shouldn't be for safety. Help should be for efficiency. Vehicles should be safe no matter what. If you had zero people, they could be very safe, but they'd be going five miles an hour. And so if you want them to go around 25 miles an hour, then you need people to come in. And for example, the vehicle come to an intersection and the vehicle can say,”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good point. So, I think it's very. Deliberately didn't call it teleoperation because what people think then is that people think away from the vehicle sits a person, sees like maybe puts on goggles or something VR and drives the car. That's not at all what we mean. But we mean the kind of intelligence whereby humans are in control except in certain places the vehicles can execute on their own. And so imagine like a room where people can see what the other vehicles are doing and everything. And there will be some people who are more like air traffic controllers call them like AV controllers.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding human behavior. There's so many of these things. And I think it just kind of didn't. And so we said, hey, why don't we take a more like a market-based approach? So we focus on a certain kind of market. We build a system for that. What we're building is not so much of an autonomous vehicle only, I would say. So we build full autonomy into the vehicles. But the way we kind of see it is that we think that the approach should actually involve humans operating them, not just not sitting in the vehicle. And I think today what we have is today we have one person operate one vehicle, no matter what that vehicle. It could be a forklift, it could be a truck, it could be a car, whatever that is. And we want to go from that to 10 people operate 50 vehicles. How do we do that?”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't know. I kind of, I would hear things like fully autonomous vehicles two years from now, three years from now. I kind of never bought it. I was a part of MIT's urban challenge entry. Kind of like it has an interesting history. I did in college and high school sort of a lot of mathematically oriented work. And I think I kind of at some point, it kind of hit me. I wanted to build something. And so I came to MIT's mechanical engineering program. And I now realize, I think my advisor hired me because I could do like really good math. But I told him that no, no, no, I want to work on that urban challenge car. I want to build the autonomous car. And I think that was kind of like a process where we really learned, I mean, what the challenges are and what kind of limitations are we up against? Like having the limitations of computers or”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say that I think that what happened to us was the following. I think we've realized a lot of kind of talk in the autonomous vehicle industry back in like 2014 even when we wanted to kind of get started.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that's what Tesla is doing. It's actually pretty different. They are on pretty orthogonal dimensions of what kind of things that they're building. They are using the same AI engine. So it's very possible that they're both going to be sort of one day kind of using a similar almost like an internal combustion engine. It's a very bad metaphor, but similar internal combustion engine and maybe one of them is building like a car. The other one is building a truck or something. So ultimately the use case is very different.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Useful in the sense that people are using it. And so I can see Tesla, sure, of course, they want to be visionary. They want to kind of put out a certain approach. And they may actually get there. But I think that there's also a primary benefit of doing all these updates and rolling it out because people pay for it. And it's basic demand, supply, market. And people like it. They're happy to pay another 5K, 10K for that. Novelty or whatever that is and they use it. It's not like they get it and they try it a couple times. It's a novelty, but they use it a lot of the time.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was just referring to the automation itself. I mean, it kind of drives itself. You still have to be kind of pay attention to it, right? But people seem to use it. So it works for something. And so people, I think people are willing to pay for it. People are willing to buy it. I think it's one of the other reasons why people buy a Tesla car. Maybe one of those reasons is Elon Musk is the CEO. And he seems like a visionary person. That's what people think. He seems like a visionary person. And so that adds like 5K to the value of the car. Then maybe another 5K is the autopilot, and you know, it's useful. I mean, it's.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They talk about it. Sometimes there's some pressure to talk about it, so they kind of go for it. But I think that they're thinking, maybe in the back of their minds, maybe they don't put it this way, but I think they realize that we're building like a new engine. It's kind of like, call it the AI engine or whatever that is. And autonomous vehicles is a very interesting embodiment of that engine that allows you to understand where the ego vehicle is, the ego thing is, where everything else is, what everything else is going to do, and how do you react, how do you actually interact with humans the right way, how do you build these systems? And I think they want to know that. They want to understand that. And so they keep going and doing that. And so on the other dimension, Tesla is doing something interesting. I mean, I think that they have a good product. People use it. I think that, you know, like it's not for me, but I can totally see people like it and people, I think they have a good product outside of automation.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, one of them seems a bit safer, the other one, or whatever the adjective for that is, and the other one seems more aggressive or whatever the adjective for that is. But I think when you turn the tables, there actually are two other orthogonal dimensions that these two are focusing on. On the one hand, for Waymo, I can see that they a little bit see it as research as well. So they kind of, I'm not sure if they're really interested in an immediate product.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some cases, that kind of choice making that unanimously is of course very hard. But I don't think it's actually that hard to inform people. So I think in one case, like for example, even the Tesla approach, I don't know, it's hard to judge how we informed it is, but it is somewhat informed. I mean, things kind of come out. I think people know what they're taking and things like that and so on. But I think the underlying, I do think that these two companies are a little bit kind of representing like...”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely some sort of a balance is kind of the right way to go. But I do think that the thing that is the most important is actually like an informed public. So I don't mind, you know, I personally, like if I were in some place, I wouldn't mind so much like taking a certain amount of risk. Some other people might. And so I think the key is for people to be informed and so that they can ideally they can make a choice.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That pretty now is that if we don't test at least the development will be slower, I mean, it doesn't mean that we're not going to be able to develop. I think it's going to be pretty hard, actually. Maybe we can. I don't know. But the thing is that those kinds of trade-offs, we already are making. And as these systems become more ubiquitous, I think those trade-offs will just really hit.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're going to have to interesting thing about the whole autonomous vehicles question, I think, is also kind of, I think a lot of times, you know, we have focused on technology development. Hundreds of years, and the product somehow followed, and then we got to make these choices and things like that. But this is a good time that we even think about autonomous taxi type of deployments and the systems that would evolve from there. And you realize the business models are different, the impact on architecture is different, urban planning. You get into like regulations. And then you get into like these issues that you didn't think about before, but like sustainability and ethics is right in the middle of it. I mean, even testing autonomous vehicles, like think about it, you're testing autonomous vehicles in human present environments. I mean, the risk may be very small, but still, you know, it's strictly greater than zero risk that you're putting people into. And so then you have that innovation risk trade-off that you're in that somewhere. And we understand.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In transportation and this and that. Always balancing that. And I think this choice has always been there in transportation, but I think the more autonomy comes in, the more explicit the choice becomes.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or we can design them that they're very sustainable. But ultimately, the sustainability efficiency tradeoffs, like they're going to be right in there. And we're going to have to make some choices. Like we're not going to be able to just kind of put it aside. So, for example, we can be very aggressive and we can reduce transportation delays, increase capacity of transportation, or we can be a lot nicer and allow other people to kind of quote-unquote own the environment and live in a nice place and then efficiency will drop. So when you think about it, I think sustainability gets attached to energy consumption or environmental impact immediately. And those are there. But like lividability is another sustainability impact. So you create an environment that people want to live in. And if robots are going around being aggressive and you don't want to live in that environment, maybe. However, you should note that if you're not being aggressive, then you're probably taking up some delay.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that this actually opens up quite a few interesting societal questions for us as we deploy, like we talk robots at large scale. So what would happen when we try to deploy robots at large scale, I think, is that we can design systems in a way that they're very efficient.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's accurate. So it really is. And so I'm not entirely sure how to go about, but I know for a fact that how these robots interact with other people in there is going to be, and that interaction is always going to be there. I mean, you could be interacting with other vehicles or other just people kind of like walking around. And like I said, the moment there's like nobody in the seat. It's like an empty thing just rolling off the street. It becomes like no different than like any other thing that's not human. And so people and maybe abuse is the wrong word, but you know people maybe rightfully even. They feel like this is a human present environment designed for humans to be and they kind of they want to own it. And then the robots, they would need to understand it and they would need to respond in a certain way.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people are aggressive, some people not so much. And, you know, like a robot could understand that by just looking at how people drive. And as they kind of come and approach, you can actually understand like if someone is going to be aggressive or not as a robot and you can make certain decisions.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing is that, for example, you and I might interact through YouTube comments. And, you know, the conversation may go a totally different angle. And so I think people kind of abusing this autonomous vehicles is a real issue in some sense. And so when you're an ego vehicle, you're trying to coordinate your way, make your way. It's actually kind of harder than being a human. It's like you not only need to be as smart as kind of humans are, but you also, you're a thing. So they're going to abuse you a little bit. So you need to make sure that you can get around and do something. I in general believe in that sort of game theoretic aspects. I've actually personally have done quite a few papers both on that kind of game theory and also like this kind of understanding people's social value orientation, for example.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's totally ignored. I mean, it's quite interesting, actually, like how we interact with things versus we interact with humans. So if you see a vehicle that's completely empty and it's trying to do something, all of a sudden it becomes a thing. So you interacted with like you interact with this table. And so you can throw your backpack or you can kick your kick it, put your feet on it and things like that. But when it's a human, there's all kinds of ways of interacting with a human. So if, you know, like you and I are face to face, we're very civil. You know, we talk.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First time, like right after Urban Challenge, I think everybody focused on localization, mapping and localization, slam algorithms came in. Google was just doing that. And so building these HTML apps, basically that's about knowing where you are. And then five years later, in 2012, 2013 came the kind of coding code AI revolution. And that started telling us where everybody else is. But we're still missing what everybody else is going to do next. And so you want to know where you are. You want to know what everybody else is. Hopefully you know what you're going to do next. And then you want to predict what other people are going to do. And that last bit has been a real challenge.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can try to match the data. Or another thing that you can do is that you can show the friend test. You can say this or that and this or that, and that would be labeling. Anything that requires human labeling, ultimately we're limited by the number of humans that we have available at our disposal and the things that they can do. They have to do a lot of other things than also labeling this data. So that modeling human behavior part is, I think, going, we're going to realize it's very tough. And I think that also affects our development of autonomous vehicles. I see that in self-driving as well. Like we want to use, so you're building self-driving, you know.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard because a lot of the other things that I mentioned to you, including simulating cameras, right? The thing there is that we know the physics, we know how it works in the real world, and we can write some rules and we can do that. Like, for example, simulating cameras, there's this thing called ray tracing. I mean, you're literally just kind of imagine it's very similar to, it's not exactly the same, but it's very similar to tracing photon by photon. They're going around, bouncing on things and coming to your eye. But human behavior, developing a dynamic like a model of that that is mathematical so that you can put it into a processor that would go through that. That's going to be hard. And so what else do you got? You can collect data.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can't distinguish one from another, but they sort of do. And it's very possible that they look at humans. It's kind of pretty hard to distinguish one from another, but we do. And so our eyes are pretty well trained to look at humans and understand if something is off, we will get it. We may not be able to pinpoint it. So in my typical friend test or mom test, what would happen is that we'd put like a human walking. And they say, you know, this is not right. Something is off in this video. I don't know what, but I can tell you it's the human. I can take the human and I can show you like inside of a building or an apartment and it will look like if we had time to render it, it will look great. And this should be no surprise. A lot of movies that people are watching, it's all computer generated. Nowadays, even you watch a drama movie. And like there's nothing going on action-wise, but it turns out it's kind of like cheaper, I guess, to render the background. And so they would.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human driven car would act around, even that is hard. But imagine trying to simulate a model of a human just doing a bunch of gestures and so on. And it's actually simulated. It's not captured like with motion capture, but it is simulated. That's very hard. In fact, today, I get involved a lot with sort of this kind of very high-end rendering projects. And I have this test that I've passed it to my friends or my mom. I send like two photos, two kind of pictures and I say rendered which one is rendered, which one is real. And it's pretty hard to distinguish. Except I realize, except when we put humans in there, it's possible that our brains are trained in a way that we recognize humans extremely well. But we don't so much recognize the built environments because built environments sort of came after per severe into sort of being humans, but humans were always there. Same thing happens, for example, you look at like monkeys.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So, you know, it has been easier to simulate what we would call intraceptive sensors, like internal sensors. So for example, inertial sensing has been easy to simulate. It has also been easy to simulate dynamics, like physics that are governed by ordinary differential equations. I mean, like how a car goes around, maybe how it rolls on the road, how it interacts with the road, or even an aircraft flying around, like the dynamic, the physics of that. What has been really hard has been to simulate extraceptive sensors, sensors that kind of like look out from the vehicle. And that's a new thing that's coming. Like laser range finders are a little bit easier, cameras, radars are a little bit tougher. I think once we nail that down, the next challenge, I think, in simulation will be to simulate human behavior. That's also extremely hard. Even when you imagine how...”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that kind of improvement, I would imagine that with improvements in hardware especially and with improvements in machine learning, I think that we would get to a point where we can simulate cameras very, very”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that a lot of people, when they hear simulation, they will focus on training immediately. But I think one thing that you said, which was interesting, it's developing. I think simulation environments actually could be key and great for development. And that's not new. Like, for example, there is people in the automotive industry have been using dynamic simulation for like decades now. And it's pretty standard that you would build and you would simulate if you want to build an embedded controller. You plug that kind of embedded computer into another computer, that other computer would simulate and so on. And I think fast forward these things, you can create pretty crazy simulation environments. Like, for instance, one of the things that has happened recently and that we can do now is that we can simulate cameras a lot better than we used to simulate them. We were able to simulate them before. And that's, I think we just hit the elbow.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not maybe the safe part, but I think the intelligent part. I mean, there are certain things that we do it with machine learning. And it's just there's like right now no other way. And I don't know how else they could be done. And there's always this conundrum. I mean, we could, like, could we could maybe gather billions of programmers? Now humans who program Perception algorithms that detect things in the sky and whatever, or I don't know, we maybe even have robots like learning a simulation environment and transfer. And they might be learning a lot better in a simulation environment than a billion humans put their brains together and try the program. Humans are pretty limited.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, ensuring just like we insure on aircraft, ensuring that it's safe. And so that becomes like building that kind of complicated hardware becomes a challenge, especially when you build that hardware. I mean, you build that software with data. And so, you know, of course, there's some rule-based software in there that kind of do a certain set of things. But then, you know, there's a lot of training there too.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like recreational people kind of fly every now and then, but it's very few. Like if you look up in the sky, you may not see any of them at any given time. Every now and now, you'll see one airplane kind of utilizing that space and you'll be surprised. And the moment you're outside of an airport a little bit, like it just kind of flies off and it goes out. And I think utilizing that airspace, the technical challenges there is. Building in autonomy and ensuring that that kind of autonomy is safe. Ultimately, I think it is going to be building in complex software, complicated so that it's maybe a few orders of magnitude more complicated than what we have on aircraft today.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The space that is kind of a little bit higher than the place where you can throw a stone. That's a tough thing when you think about it. You know, it takes a kid and a stone to take an aircraft down and then what happens. But, you know, imagine the airspace that's high enough so that you cannot throw a stone. But it is low enough that you're not interacting with the very large aircraft that are flying several thousand feet above. And that airspace is underutilized. Or it's actually kind of not utilized at all.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll get to that question, but just one thing is that I think, you know, sometimes we think about what's going to happen in the next 50 years. It's just really hard to guess, right? Next 50 years, I don't know. I mean, we could get what's going to happen in transportation in the next 50 years. We could get flying saucers. I could bet on that. I think there's a 50-50 chance that, you know, like you can build machines that can ionize the air around them and push it down with magnets and they would fly like a flying saucer. That is possible. And it might happen in the next 50 years. So it's a bit hard to guess. Like when you think about 50 years before. But I would think that, you know, there's this kind of notion where there's a certain type of airspace that we call the agile airspace. And there's good amount of opportunity.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, or almost like a like an Uber. So four people, six people, eight people. In our work in autonomous vehicles, I see that. So there's kind of like a bit of a need for one person transport, but also like a few people. So you and I could take that trip together. We could have lunch. I think it kind of sounds crazy. Maybe even sounds a bit cheesy, but I think that those kinds of things are some of the real opportunities. And I think it's not like the typical airplane and the airport would disappear very quickly, but I would think that, you know, many people would feel like they would spend an extra hundred dollars on doing that and cutting that four hour travel down to one and a half hours.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's possible to be honest. Delivery drones is one thing, but you can imagine for transportation, like an important use case is, you know, we're in Boston, you want to go from Boston to New York, and you want to do it from the top of this building to the top of another building in Manhattan. And you're going to do it in one and a half hours. And that's a big opportunity, I think.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest challenges, I think, of our time to put vehicles there and to go back to your question, I think doing that at scale, meaning you go out in your city and you have thousands or tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles that are going around. It is so dense to the point where if you see one of them, you look around, you see another one. It is that dense. And that density, we've never done anything like that before. And I would bet that that kind of density will first happen with autonomous cars because I think we can bend the environment a little bit. Especially kind of making them safe is a lot easier when they're on the ground, when they're in the air, it's a little bit more complicated. But I don't see that there's going to be a big separation. I think that, you know, there will come a time that we're going to quickly see these things unfold.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pack of things that are related to us putting robotic vehicles into human present environments. And as humans, they will not potentially be even trained to interact with them. They may not even be using the services that are provided by these vehicles. They may not even know that they're autonomous. They're just doing their thing, living in environments that are designed for humans, not for robots. And then I think...”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That but when you think about it, you know, robots are autonomous, they work, they work on their own, but they are either like an isolated environment or they are in sort of, you know, they may be at scale, but they're really confined to a certain environment that they don't interact so much with humans. And so, you know, they work in, I don't know, factory floors, warehouses, they work on Mars, they are fully autonomous over there. But I think that the real challenge of our time is to take these vehicles and put them into places where humans are present. So now I know that there's a lot of like human-robot interaction type of things that need to be done and so on. That's one thing. But even just from the fundamental algorithms and systems and the business cases or maybe the business models, even like architecture planning, societal issues, legal issues, there's a whole bunch of”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think in general at scale is tough. Like for example, when you think about it, we have actually deployed a lot of robots in the, let's say, the past 50 years.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. I think that autonomous flying, just kind of doing it for consumer drones and so on, the kinds of applications that we're looking at right now is probably easier. And so I think that that's maybe one of the reasons why it took off like literally a little earlier than the autonomous cars. But I think if we look ahead, I would think that the real benefits of autonomous flying, unleashing them in like transportation, logistics and so on, I think it's a lot harder than autonomous driving. So I think my guess is that we've seen a few kind of machines fly here and there, but we really haven't yet seen any kind of machine, like at massive scale, large scale being deployed and flown and so on. And I think that's going to be after we kind of resolve some of the large scale deployments of autonomous driving.”
2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source