Uber announced a strategic partnership with Carnegie Mellon University back in February to work with CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) to develop self-driving cars. We found an excellent and detailed article on Popular Science’s website that dives into the depths of the story, and also looks at why Uber’s partnership with one of the world’s leading robotics labs might actually have a negative impact on the world of robotics research.
The center was typically a flurry of activity, with engineers hunched over terminals tethered to all manner of autonomous machines, including mowers, harvesters, excavators, and combat vehicles. Now, in the middle of a weekday, the lab—part of the biggest robotics program in the country—seemed abandoned. It looked more like a museum closed for renovations.
What happened to NREC? In a word: Uber. The San Francisco-based firm is an exemplar of Silicon Valley success, having reportedly raised $2.8 billion in funding on the strength of a single car-service app. Now Uber is racing to build self-driving cars. No longer content to take on traditional taxi companies, Uber hopes to use robots to lower fares, and ultimately compete with the entire automotive industry. “When there’s no other dude in the car,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Code Conference in 2014, referring to the service’s human drivers, “the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle…and then car ownership goes away.”
Uber opened their Advanced Technologies Center just a short walk from NREC and after the announcement of the partnership, began quietly hiring robotics engineers from it. The article continues:
By the time we visited, the startup had hired 40 or 50 of NREC’s roughly 150 researchers, including Tony Stentz, the roboticist who had served as the center’s associate director for 13 years and director for nearly five.
“Uber was incredibly smart in that it went to the one place, outside Google, that has all of the right people—people who actually have a shot at tackling autonomous driving,” says Boris Sofman, who studied robotics at CMU and had Stentz as an adviser.
So why is this a bad thing for robotics research? Read on…
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