It may seem like a Jetson-style fantasy, but cars that drive
themselves could be a reality in a decade, and a Morgan Hill
company has the inside track to make it happen. Bruce and Dave
Hall, brothers who run Morgan Hill-based Velodyne Acoustics,
converted a Toyota Tundra into an autonomous pickup that drove
itself for more than six miles in the California desert earlier
this spring.
It may seem like a Jetson-style fantasy, but cars that drive themselves could be a reality in a decade, and a Morgan Hill company has the inside track to make it happen.
Bruce and Dave Hall, brothers who run Morgan Hill-based Velodyne Acoustics, converted a Toyota Tundra into an autonomous pickup that drove itself for more than six miles in the California desert earlier this spring.
“It was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen,” Bruce Hall said of watching the green Tundra driving itself across a freeway outside Barstow. “It was perfectly controlled.”
The truck was Team DAD’s entry into the DARPA Grand Challenge, which offered $1 million to anyone who created a vehicle that could move itself across a 200-mile course on March 13.
Team DAD (for Digital Auto Drive, a play on the name of the street, Digital Drive, where Velodyne is located) came in third out of 15 entries. No one completed the entire course, and the Halls are hoping that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s department that sponsored the challenge, will be hosting another one soon.
Dave, who founded Velodyne and develops its technology, put more than a year’s time into developing the software and other technology that made the autonomous truck a reality. He holds the title of CEO and founder of Velodyne. Bruce, the company’s president, runs the company on a day-to-day basis, managing sales and operations.
Velodyne was founded in 1983 and moved to Morgan Hill from San Jose two years ago. Privately held, it employs 55 people and sells a wide range of subwoofers.
“We own 80 to 90 percent of the market share of the high-end subwoofer market,” Bruce said.
The truck uses an innovate real-time imaging stereo vision technology check the road for 700 to 800 feet ahead. But it requires a lot of computing power to analyze all that data. The Halls used cutting-edge Texas Instrument chips that can redraw a 3-D map sixty times per second.
“This was only possible through absolute state-of-the-art chips from TI,” Bruce said.
Every time the map is redrawn, Bruce said, the chips evaluate up to 100 possible paths before deciding on the best route.
“By far our most important partner was Texas Instruments, which provided high-speed digital signal processors that process 30 billion pixels per second,” Bruce said. “That thing is a total screamer.”
The Tundra, which Bruce and David use to commute to work every day, was modified to house video cameras, a GPS antenna, the all-important TI chips as well as systems to control steering, braking and navigation. The glove compartment was replaced with a LCD display that showed the 3-D map the chips were constantly redrawing.
The Team DAD Tundra performed beautifully at the DARPA Challenge, negotiating an early narrow gate with precision.
“It was a 15-foot gate and (Team DAD’s Tundra) split the middle of it,” Bruce recalled with obvious pride, noting that many of the competitors bumped the sides of the gate as they passed through it.
Competitors didn’t get the course details until a few hours before the start of the race. The brothers started transferring a file containing the 5,247 waypoints that plotted the course from Slash X, a biker bar in Barstow, to the finish line in Primm, Nev., at 3:30 a.m. on March 13.
“It was a bumpy, nasty road, basically a trail,” Bruce said.
At 6.4 miles into the race, Team DAD’s Tundra was stopped so a tow truck could remove another entrant that had fallen off the course. When the Team DAD’s truck tried to move again, it was on a portion of the course with a 5 mph speed limit. Because the programming told the truck how far to depress the gas pedal to achieve 5 mph, but didn’t check to see if the truck was actually moving, it was unable to get enough speed to go over a football-sized rock in its path.
“We were two programming days away from winning,” Bruce said wistfully.
They were a mile behind the top finisher and .6 of a mile behind the second-place team.
Despite Team DAD’s third-place finish, Bruce and David are happy they entered the challenge and look forward to another opportunity to compete.
“We invested about $40,000, plus Dave’s time,” Bruce said. “It was a learning experience.”
The DARPA Grand Challenge provided insight that will prove invaluable as the Halls seek to achieve their goal to be one of the leading players in the autonomous driving field.
“Automation to save military lives and civilian lives is inevitable,” Bruce predicted. “We believe we have very strong obstruction detection technology and visual technology.”
But Bruce acknowledges that there is a long way to go before vehicles that drive themselves are a commonplace reality.
“We believe there needs to be a reasonably substantial advance in the state of the art in environment sensing,” Bruce said.
That means finding ways for computers to identify obstacles in the vehicle’s path and make consistently correct decisions about the proper reaction.
Bruce believes that if anyone can create that technology, his brother can.
“Dave is an extraordinary engineer. He’s constantly pushing the envelope,” Bruce said.
The Toyota Tundra sitting in Velodyne’s parking lot is testament to that. In 18 short months, using Dave’s engineering genius, it went from concept to stock car to autonomous vehicle.
Dave is quietly confident in his abilities.
“No one else could have done it,” he said of the Tundra’s remarkable transformation.
If you find yourself riding in a self-navigating, self-controlling autonomous vehicle in a decade or so, odds are good that Dave and Bruce Hall will have had a lot to do with it.
