Optimus Ride

SERTAC KARAMAN: Optimus Ride is an MIT spin-off. We, as five founders, came together at MIT. I, myself, am an associate professor at MIT. I'm affiliated with the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as The Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and a new institute for data systems and society. I've been doing research at MIT for about a decade, focusing on a number of different aspects of robotics, including self-driving cars.

Our CEO, Ryan Chin, is a Media Lab graduate. He's been at the MIT Media Lab for almost two decades. Most recently, he's been the managing director of the City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He is one of the inventors of MIT CityCar.

Our CTO, Albert Huang, is also an MIT graduate. Albert and I went to graduate school together at MIT, in the computer science department. And we worked on a number of projects together, including MIT is entering the DARPA Urban challenge. After that, Albert went to Rethink Robotics, as well as Google X, as a lead perception engineer, and then he joined Optimus Ride as the CTO.

One of our other co-founders is Ramiro Almeida, who is a seasoned entrepreneur in a number of diverse set of industries, including transportation. In particular, he was the Loeb Fellow in Harvard's Law Graduate School of Design for a year. And he then spent some time in MIT's Media Lab, where we got a chance to meet him.

Our CMO, Jenny Larios Berlin, is a transportation veteran. She worked at Zipcar for a number of years and she grew their university deployment team from almost ground zero to where it is today. She has also gotten her MBA, as well as a master's in urban planning, from MIT. And we came together with Jenny also at MIT.

Optimist Ride has actually been around for more than a year. We've been developing self-driving vehicles in-house for a while. Most recently, we have gotten some seed investment from a number of investors, including First Smart Capital and NextView Ventures, as well as the GPU venture arm of NVIDIA, and also the venture arm that's led by Joi Ito, the Media Lab director. We have a number of other venture capital investors who were able to join our team as investors.

With this new investment, we've built an incredible team, that includes a number of PhDs, almost a dozen PhDs and a dozen MIT graduates, who are all working together to enable a new type of self-driving vehicle technology. That will enable, in turn, new transportation systems.

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SERTAC KARAMAN: The Optimus Ride relies on a number of things. One is definitely technology. The kind of technology that we're working to build at that Optimus Ride has been developed mainly at MIT and has been tested. And we've been trying to deploy it. It goes beyond technology as well.

If you look at our founding team, you will realize people that strong business backgrounds are there. If you look at our team, you'll realize people with strong kind of urban planning and design backgrounds are in there as well. So Optimus Ride, we're focusing on both technology. And at the same time, certain business and urban aspects, working with cities, and so on to really make autonomous cars available to the end users as soon as possible.

So our key accomplishment that we would like to get to one day is to really deploy, actually deploy autonomous vehicles in places for people to use, and do that deployment in a scalable way. Make that with-- build that with vehicles that are sort of enable affordable, equitable, accessible, clean transportation that is just enjoyable. That's what we're hoping to do.

We are admittedly in stealth mode, but we are hoping to come out in the next few months with certain announcements that are going to detail how we're going to accomplish these things. I personally believe that there's a deep relationship between academia, industry, innovation that goes beyond. The reason is mainly my experience, my own experience.

I remember 10 years ago, we were doing the DARPA Urban Challenge. Many people would look at our car and say, robots look cute. It's an academic project. These guys are doing great and so on. But then 10 years, if you fast forward, now self-driving vehicles has really become something that people see the impact. People believe that it is going to be one of the things that we're going to have in the future, and one of the things that we're going to rely on for a number of transportation and logistics needs.

So that 10 years of experience really helped me see how academia, for example, starting out from MIT. Not just for sort of professors and students, but everyone that MIT touches. And how they can take our projects that really just kind of look like research projects, or cute demonstrations, and so on. And how that becomes the thing, the next big thing that's going to change the way. I think MIT does that in the best possible way.

I strongly believe that MIT has an incredible ecosystem when it comes to startups. Everyone knows that MIT has been doing, or has been getting out startups for a while now. But at the same time, I believe that with ILP's new initiatives, such as the Startup Exchange and a number of other initiatives going around at MIT, the startup community is getting really stronger by connecting with each other, and also connecting with other companies, such as OEMs, and so on, as well as connecting with, for example, venture capital that is in Boston and beyond Boston.

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SERTAC KARAMAN: I would say that developing self-driving vehicles is a challenge that goes beyond technology. There are challenges in, for example, policy, insurance, law. There are challenges in urban planning, and architecture, and in many other places that you can ever imagine. Technology is just one aspect of it. And many companies in this space are pushing technology, which is a good thing to do, but we will need to think about a number of other challenges.

The current ethical challenges we face, for example, are-- they include even testing autonomous vehicles in the cities where humans are present as well. So every company that's doing that kind of testing are essentially taking on an ethical challenge. And we are very careful with that. Our approach in terms of testing, and deployment, and so on, is always safety first. And we believe many other companies are essentially-- we are hoping that many other companies are shooting for this.

As we go forward, we will see other ethical challenges. For example, I have this memory from the Urban Challenge where we programmed a car. And we had a piece of code that our car would realize that it would go into a crash a split second earlier. All we put there was to just slam the brakes, do nothing else so that we can come to a stop as soon as possible, even if it's a crash we could probably avoid it.

However, in the future, we'll get into in places where some software engineer at some point will have to write code in a little block that basically chooses how the crash is going to happen. That is something that, as humans, we cannot think about right now when we drive the cars. But when it's a robot driving, it will get to the point where it will execute some software right when certain things go wrong, so we'll have to face these challenges.

Ethical challenges are important. I would say they are one of the biggest challenges that we are going to face in the industry. There are many more, I have to admit, that include ethical challenges, but go beyond. As we think about transportation for the last maybe 150 years, every new innovation has been about going faster and further.

How can I go point A to point B even faster? And how can I go even further? I think now we finally have the chance to think about it a little bit more broadly. It's not just about efficiency. It's not just about reducing the delays and increasing the throughput, but it's also about sustainability.

And sustainability has a number of different dimensions to it. For example, one dimension of sustainability is energy consumption. You may want to reduce energy consumption for the obvious reasons. Or you may want to reduce the environmental impact. At some point, you're moving people and goods around, and we're spending energy, and that has an impact on the environment that you can try to reduce.

But sustainability actually goes beyond that. For example, societal acceptance could be sustainability. Nowadays we build a train track on a certain road. And people move away from that.

People just don't find it enjoyable, versus you take a road and close it off to traffic, and people flock in that area. People love that. There is clearly some norms of social acceptance that is important.

We believe that the kind of self-driving vehicles or the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that we can build that can enable certain kinds of transportation, systems that enables all these sustainability metrics, for example, that can make it energy efficient which may enable it to be affordable, that can make it reduce the monetary impact for example, or that can in some sense just make it more enjoyable. It can be more aesthetic, that people may want to live in and live together with. So that's the types of technologies or business models that we are hoping to eventually get to, not just for Optimus Ride, but for the whole industry.

SERTAC KARAMAN: I think that, in general, it's not very easy to embrace technology. I mean, there are a number of places where the technology-- especially as the control is taken away from the human, there is always this feeling of the trust kind of disappearing no matter how safe it is. The most important example I think is buses versus airplanes. A lot of people still don't trust airplanes. They don't want to fly in an airplane.

And when you think about it, it's this big machine. It's going through air in a violent way. And it feels scary. And you have no control. You're just kind of sitting in the passenger seat.

So people don't-- there are many people who don't want to ride in an airplane. But at the same time, it's one of the safest transportation technologies that we've ever built. I do see that there may be a challenge in people trusting self-driving vehicles. That challenge may come from just people being a passenger, sitting in there and just waiting for this car to drive themselves.

However, given that, some people are familiar with these numbers. Some aren't. In the United States, there are about 35,000 lives that are lost every year to traffic accidents. Self-driving vehicles could potentially completely eliminate that.

And I think that we may face a challenge in people not trusting self-driving vehicles eventually, even though they are actually very, very safe. And that is the same challenge that we face getting people on the airplanes, and so on. I don't see it as a major challenge, but I see that that is going to happen in the future.

I personally think that things have been moving fast in the industry. [INAUDIBLE] when I look at the decade background that I have had in the field, things have come together very, very rapidly, especially in the last five years, specifically in the technology domain. It seems like the kind of technology that we're using is really diverse. It's not just a particular algorithm that enables everything, but it's so many.

And there are software implementations which are very complex. And even the computers that they run on and the sensors that enable this, they're all coming together at a very high pace. I like it a lot, as a technologist, I have to say.

At the same time, I think we're facing a number of challenges in different domains as well, from developing business models, to the policy, and law, and urban architecture, and so on. And they are also picking up pace. So that's a good thing as well. Given where we are, I am hopeful about autonomous vehicles. I think still that autonomous vehicle technology or self-driving vehicle technology will surprise us.

And it will surprise us I think in two ways. One way, I think it will really come early, as some people predict. Maybe not tomorrow, but maybe in a couple years, or in a few years, we'll start to see autonomous cars. We'll start to really experience it.

But another way I think we'll be surprised is that, they may not arrive in the way they we expect. They may not be in the car that you drive, but they maybe arrive in a variety of other ways. That may be another surprise that we face, the moment they arrive.

So I believe a number of people actually think about self-driving cars as the technology coming into our vehicles, and just kind of changing our vehicle, and making it easier for us to drive. I think that's a bit of a narrow vision. And in fact, many people kind of believe, for example, when self-driving cars come in, many people will lose their jobs, for example.

There is another side of the coin, where there are people living right here in the United States. And because they are visually impaired or because they have other disabilities, they cannot even commute to work. I mean, commuting to work is one thing, but just basic things, for example, just picking up food or getting your laundry and so on. So I believe this type of technology will be a big enabler for a large number of people and will actually put them to work because they can commute to work, for example.

SERTAC KARAMAN: I think that the design process that we follow in building self-driving cars, thus far for many companies, or for many researchers, it's been mainly focused on technology. I personally believe that a single technology focus just builds things that flows in the easiest direction of technology, which may not end up solving real problems at the end. The right way to approach, my feeling, is to look at the problem that we're trying to solve and build a technology that actually does that rather than just kind of going the other way around.

In this domain, I think we're going to face a number of challenges, because the kind of technology that may serve one type of application may not serve the other. As we go and look into details finer and finer, we may realize that one kind of system that serves a certain society better may not serve a different society as well. So at Optimus Ride, we really pay attention to this. We will be doing a number of pilots in different locations to be able to understand what are the types of little things that make a big difference in different locations as we develop and deploy our technology in these domains.

I think that we are at an important crossroads in human history. We are building a certain set of technologies that many people collectively call artificial intelligence. And that's important, because it's really capable of doing a number of things. It provides-- it's the set of tools and everything that provides machines to take up a number of things that humans normally do.

And many people fear that their jobs may be at risk because machines will be able to do that better. I understand those concerns, like many people in the community. At the same time, I've got this feeling that I think AI will do nothing but multiply the opportunities, multiply the output.

As the output increases, the amount of output that we can generate, as it increases, we will-- I think we will need more and more people to help that out. And I personally believe that some of the mundane tasks that are dangerous maybe sometimes even, they may completely disappear. And the new tasks may be more enjoyable, maybe more enriching intellectually.

I think certainly, one of the important questions in artificial intelligence is to be able to build a number of societal values into artificial intelligence. And those societal values may mean different things depending on how you look at it. For example, the simplest example could be to make sure, if you give certain scoring, or selection, or what not to AI, it's not discriminating. It's not an easy thing to do.

In our domain, while we build self-driving vehicles or transportation systems that rely on it, we have built, as human society, a number of different ways of interacting with each other in traffic, or interacting with each other inside transportation systems as well. So one of the challenges that, I don't think the industry looks at it deeply, but I think we, as Optimus Ride, well-positioned to look at, is to make sure to integrate these kind of societal norms and some of the societal constraints or objectives into the kind of technology or the kind of system that we aim to build.

SERTAC KARAMAN: I think there are a number of things that sets Optimus Ride apart from many others that are in the same or similar industries. That includes the kind of technology that we're building. but it also includes the type of business models that we're applying and the type of approach that we're taking. You know, identifying what kind of places we go, and what kind of technology we deploy.

I think another unique thing is our team. There is the founding team that I mentioned, but also the team that was built around this founding team that really makes us strong. Beyond that, the kind of facilities that we're setting up to actually build autonomous vehicles and deploy them are very unique.

We have just moved into a space and Boston seaport that is 20,000 square feet that allows us to build, test, develop, and deploy autonomous vehicles in a very short span of time while doing it very, very carefully paying attention to safety and so on. So what's next for Optimus Ride? I believe that Optimus Ride is very well positioned to be one of the most important players in this domain. While we build self-driving vehicle technologies that will contribute to new types of transportation systems that can truly transform transportation in the way that, for example, trains did 150 years ago, or the affordable car did 100 years ago, or the airliners have done 50 years ago.

I think we're at the cusp of an important transformation that will be enabled by technology and robotics, as well as the kind of technology that goes into our smartphones, as well as new innovations in business, such as sharing economy and so on. And I think Optimus Ride will be one of the companies that really puts everything together to enable these new transportation systems that will make a big mark. I believe when we look back, for example, 100 years from now, that we will bucket them into the same impact that has been placed by things like--