The Pittsburgh Robotics Network hosted its "The State of Our Autonomous Vehicle Industry" panel discussion on Thursday at the New Hazlett Theater in the North Side.
At about an hour in length, the candid discussion moderated by PRN Executive Director Joel Reed featured five AV executives — Aurora Innovation Inc. CEO and Co-Founder Chris Urmson, Argo AI President and Co-Founder Peter Rander, Waymo Via Head of Perception Kevin Peterson, Motional Vice President of Technical Programs Balajee Kannan and Locomation CEO and Co-Founder Cetin Mericli. Topics discussed touched on the current state of the industry, where it's likely heading and the role Pittsburgh will play in all of it as some of the locally-based companies represented in the panel look to commercially deploy their self-driving vehicles — from trucks to cars and even delivery vans or robotaxis — potentially as soon as 2023.
It's an industry that many attribute as being started in Pittsburgh following the first-place victory of Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing team in the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge, a 50-person team led by CMU's William “Red” Whittaker who the PRN also recognized with its inaugural Pittsburgh Robotics Impact Award before the panel discussion began. Panelists Peterson and Urmson were among the winning participants in that challenge, as was Argo's Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Salesky and Aurora Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Drew Bagnell.
"When we cooked this thing up, robotics was a fantasy and science fiction and absolutely nothing more," Whittaker said upon receiving the award. "It was a skinny vision to develop, secure, feed this world and explore worlds beyond. We wrote down things thinking of machines that would work in the world to farm, mine, manufacture, drive and of course, explore the planets."
For Peterson and Waymo, a sister company to Google LLC and a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., that change from fantasy to reality as alluded to by Whittaker has become even more apparent recently.
"I think the turning point for me really has been in the last few years where it's gone from science fiction to an industry. It really becomes real when it starts to touch a lot of people, and in the cars, that's giving people rides," Peterson said. "I think we're starting to look at things like trucks — there's a ton of industry out there where robotics is super impactful, has this huge, huge volume. It's a huge business and it's just going to grow forever. So when is it going to become huge? Well, it's already huge and it's only going to grow. And I think a lot of that started here (in Pittsburgh)."
And continuing that Pittsburgh legacy is worthy of repeating, according to Urmson.
"I want to stress that we certainly through all of this have been building on the shoulders of giants and the immense amount of research that happened in Pittsburgh that laid the foundation for this," said Urmson, who earlier in the week was joined by Gov. Tom Wolf and others to celebrate the official opening of Aurora's (NASDAQ: AUR) new headquarters in the Strip District. "But then we really have to bring the industrial levels of funding, the industrial levels of access to talent to go and build out, and it's amazing to watch the last decade as the ecosystem around this has exploded."
According to Kannan, Motional's ability to form strategic partnerships with those looking to explore the use of AV in their respective industries has been an important focal point for the company as it looks to deploy its technology more broadly. A joint venture between automaker Hyundai Motor Group and auto supplier Aptiv, Motional maintains its headquarters in Boston but has a significant testing and development presence in Pittsburgh.
"It is a long game and the investment is going to take time and you need these strategic, critical partners that you can go back and forth with," Kannan said. "We spent the last couple of days with (Hyundai), and it was an interesting but collaborative discussion where you're pushing and pulling in terms of trying to figure out what it is that is critically needed. You need that strategic partner that is willing to play the long game and make the investment and understand what you may need to compromise in the short term."
When asked if it's strategic partnerships or customer relationships that matter most to Pittsburgh-based Locomation, Mericli answered with a resounding "yes."
"It takes a village to raise an autonomous vehicle," Mericli then said. "Partners can be suppliers, partners can be manufacturers, and you can be a supplier to someone. Partners are definitely the future customers, especially the early stage customers that we all are venturing into (as an) uncharted territory."
As for challenges that still remain before AVs become more prevalent, Rander said Pittsburgh-based Argo and other AV companies are leading the charge to help change Pennsylvania law that would permit these companies to conduct AV testing on public roadways without the need for a human safety operator to be in the vehicle. A Pennsylvania State Senate bill has been working its way through the legislature since January 2022 that would permit this and Gov. Wolf has said he's willing to sign it, but a more definitive timeline as to when that could occur has yet to become known. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 10 states explicitly allow AV companies to conduct testing without requiring a human to be in the vehicle while several others don't outright prohibit the ability for these companies to do so.
"Obviously, right now, we all have safety drivers when we are operating in Pennsylvania because it's illegal to not have one there, but it's kind of strange, we're actually the place that's supposed to be this hub of self-driving technology," Rander said. "We (need) to make that transition and other states have already done that, so (we're) eager to see that happen."
The panel discussion served as the official kickoff event for PRN's every-other-month Industry Insights Speaker Series. It hosted a smaller soft launch panel in February that touched on the region's growing agricultural robotics tech scene and it's already planning a health care- and robotics-focused event in June.
