We're working on riderless and balance-assisted bicycles and motorcycles. We're working to ship our flagship bike and we're about to launch a balance-bike for kids that helps them learn faster and sets up virtual bumpers while they learn.
Regen will usually only gain you 3-5% total range, most of the power from biking is dissipated as heat through aero drag, even if you're biking up and down hills. Source – my company exclusively does ebike research and development.
Ebikers naturally start taking routes that optimize for safety and enjoyment over avoiding hills. It would be cool for Strava or Goog Maps to detect ebikers (easy to tell from speed vs road grade) and weight their routes more heavily in deciding the best route to recommend.
I also grew up in NZ idolizing Faraday. I feel sad to see obviously smart and passionate folks like this with deep technical interests end up in venture so young.
You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.
This is bizarre, I’m in non-car autonomy but I talk daily with car autonomy folks. Everyone has been expecting a consolidation of companies through acquisitions but drive.ai showed us that it’s probably not going to happen. At The Information mobility event last month one of the SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else. Looks like backing up billions with more billions might be the playbook for now.
I've done this math before and it's not encouraging. Global carbon fuel burning is more than two cubic miles annually. A billion trees will capture about a trillion kgs of carbon over 10-20 years, but yearly we're burning about 4 trillion kgs of just crude oil.
I did undergrad at UW, several of my classmates did grad work on LIGO and were on the gravity wave teams when they had their first detection. Amazing what timing can do for a career. I visited Hanford LIGO in 2012 before the detection, really interesting back then to hear their frustrations and steady commitment.
I graduated and did a few strtuos, now working on autonomous self-delivering ebikes in SODO.
I think we all know what the quote is about even though it's not an actual Ponzi scheme, it's just fraud. Another good reminder to question everything, especially group wisdom.
"How would you ensure having the exact same starting conditions each time?" is the best question in that thread, and this was the biggest challenge for us in training our bikes to balance using a NN. Bikes are hard because they're a non-holonomic system, it isn't just a matter of finding linearized equations of motion.
I've lived in a ~250sqft 1940's era wood train car for the past 9 years, with my wife and now a newborn. It is doable if you enjoy the constraints and how it affects your decision making. I live about 5 miles from Seattle in a very rich neighborhood (a few blocks from the Paul Allen estate) on a large piece of land that is set aside as a reserve, while most of my neighbors have 5000sqft houses. As long as you have amenities (washer, dryer, full kitchen, shower, dishwasher) like I do then it's not some sort of struggle, it's more a set of limits to optimize against.
My neighbors can't tell if I'm eclectic and rich or weird and poor. It's a good thing.
I use this to send messages to the agent that won't be recorded in the transcript because I delete it after typing it. Not sure if it has gotten me better results from the agents but it's fun to do.
I tweeted at him to ask him what size lens and sensor he has so I could estimate how much energy/flux was hitting his sensor. Anyone have an idea of how many lidar it would take to saturate an area and make distance measurements useless? It's tougher with lidar because you can't easily frequency shift like with radar.
I've been following these guys for a while and I really like their approach. In our lab we've done a lot of work to improve control of cheaper BLDC motors (low gearing) to mimic human control and compliance, and these guys are using similar methods to achieve accuracy. Most engineers just decrease tolerances to improve accuracy but using a blunter instrument and making it accurate with good software is an approach that leads to much much cheaper systems and robots. Drones are a good example, quadcopters are inelegant and somewhat inefficient flying machines but their cheap and blunt hardware comes alive with good control theory and software.
I've noticed a surge ofex-uber folks looking to angel invest having been popping up in the past few months. I'm excited for this IPO purely for the money that will be invested in transportation this next year.
I use quaternions at work (AVs) and used them in physics and astronomy in school. The math he's talking about is darned close to the math done behind the scences with quaternions, it's just easier to grasp because it has visual references. Thing is, you only need to understand the math once to be able to use any of this stuff, and there's nothing wrong with taking it for granted after that. Either method is good enough.
Basicallt, quaternions are hard to understand but easy to use.