Advanced Autonomy

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shift in the supply chain as companies were forced to face the unpredictable nature of our world. Consumer behaviors, workflow processes, and even the ability to socially interact, changed. With this, the production of goods and services drastically slowed as a result of clogged ports, labor shortages, spikes in demand, material shortages, and much more. These disruptions accelerated the need for businesses to innovate and build a more resilient supply chain. My guest today is Melanie Stone. She recently wrote an article on the ways that autonomous vehicle technology can help us build supply chain resilience and today, we’re going to dive into what she’s discovered.Read the original article on supply chain resiliency here.

Cyngn recently conducted a study on the productivity gains that our client, Global Logistics and Fulfillment, enjoyed after deploying DriveMod to their warehouse. Today, we welcome Jacob Green, a business manager at Cyngn, who conducted the study, to dive into the results of how an autonomous vehicle deployment changed how this 3PL does business.To download the full case study, click here.

It’s women’s history month so today we’re going to do something a little different. Luke hands over hosting duties to Niki Bossonis where she leads a discussion with a few Cyngn women: Emily Macnamara, Ashley Hemmingway, and Azalea Phangsoa. It’s a frank conversation about the gender pay gap, how assertive women are allowed to be in the workplace, and what makes them hopeful about how corporate America is changing. Enjoy!

Our guest today is Raymond Wang. Raymond is the Chief Executive Officer of Greenland Technologies, which develops clean and sustainable machinery and technologies for the global industrial market.  He joined the company in 2019 as CEO when Greenland went public on the NASDAQ (GTEC).  Prior to joining Greenland, he has led roles in finance, third-party logistics and emerging tech.  Raymond is a graduate of Rutgers University and is based in New Jersey. Raymond joins us today as a representative of Greenland, which recently announced a partnership with Cyngn to bring autonomous capabilities to their industrial vehicle fleet.

My guests today are Ben Landen and Jordan Stern. Ben is the VP of Business Development and Jordan is the Director of Product Management here at Cyngn.Today we are going to discuss Robotics as a Service. Robotics as a Service represents a new paradigm where key assets at your organizations are rented instead of owned. ABI research predicts that there will be 1.3 million RaaS installations by 2026, generating over $34 billion in revenue.For Cyngn, Robotics as a Service represents the easiest way for us to put autonomous vehicle technology in customer’s hands — without requiring them to staff up a maintenance team or a crew of engineers to get the most value out of such a cutting edge investment.In this conversation, we’ll discuss Robotics as a Service and dive into the ways this shifting paradigm will make it easier to tap into new technologies and get work done.

New Cyngn Strategic Business Developer, Jason Kenagy, joins the podcast to discuss the rise of private 5G networks and how it will help enterprise organizations achieve their autonomous vehicle goals of the future.

Since we launched the podcast a few weeks ago, we’ve really been focused on the technical and philosophical aspects of the autonomous vehicle sector. Today, we’re gonna do something different and speak with a colleague from one of our strategic partners, First Transit. Jeff Peterson is the Director of Autonomous Technology Business Development for First Transit. He leads the company’s pursuit and development of autonomous vehicle opportunities.  Throughout his career, Jeff has fostered relationships with potential clients to fully understand their needs and develop strategies to achieve their goals.  To this end, he works with operations teams and senior leadership to identify the best solutions for its clients’ mobility needs.  Jeff has been instrumental in First Transit’s growth and leadership in the automated vehicle space, and plays a vital role in the company’s strategic direction in this emerging market.

In this week's episode of the Advanced Autonomy podcast, we spoke with Carl Brackpool, a Research Associate at Colorado School of Mines. We discussed the future of mining and the changing career trajectories of those who join an industry that is shifting by the day.Carl Brackpool is a Research Associate at the Colorado School of Mines where he not only works to advance the next generation of mining technology — but also to develop opportunities for greater environmental efficiency and sustainability across the entire industry.In addition to his research at the Colorado School of Mines, Mr. Brackpool worked at Hexagon Mining from 2017-2019, where he led initiatives to bring new mining technologies to market. In this conversation, we’ll be discussing the intersection of the mining sector with autonomous vehicles and other new technologies that are leading the industry toward fully autonomous mines.

My guest today is Jordan Stern. He’s the Senior Business Manager at Cyngn, where he is primarily focused on helping industrial organizations deploy autonomy solutions in their ODD’s, today.Although the autonomous vehicle sector is a few years away from deploying full autonomy across all of transportation, AV technology is robust enough, even today, that industrial organizations can derive greater speed, efficiency, and profitability by making investments right now.The problem, of course, is how the hell to that? In this conversation, we’ll dive into the state of industrial AV capabilities and give you some clear steps you can take to determine where — and how — your organization can begin to dip the toe in the next wave of vehicle intelligence and autonomy.

Since we launched the podcast a few weeks ago, we’ve really been focused on the technical and philosophical aspects of the autonomous vehicle sector. Today, I wanted to do something a little bit different to discuss what it’s like to actually work in this innovative and rapidly changing field. My guest today is Emily McNamara who is the Director of Operations, Finance, and People for Cyngn. Today we’re going to discuss her journey, dive into the Cyngn organization more broadly, and give you an insider’s look into how Cyngn finds and recruits top talent. If you are thinking about a career in the autonomous vehicle sector or Silicon Valley more broadly, this conversation will be of particular interest. Hi Emily, welcome to the show.For more fascinating discussions on the rise of self-driving vehicles, including interviews with industry leaders, technical conversations with engineers, and insider stories check out the following:1. Full Video Episodes: http://bit.ly/advancedautonomy​2. Full Audio Episodes: https://podcast.cyngn.com​

This is Advanced Autonomy. I’m Luke Renner. You know, one of my favorite things about working in this space is that we are at the very, very beginning, and there are still tons of problems that autonomous vehicle researchers are still trying to solve. These problems span all areas of in-vehicle technology to wider infrastructure communication.My guest today, Biao Ma, is the VP of Engineering and the Head of Autonomy at Cyngn. In this conversation, he’s going to give us an engineer’s insider look into the three main problems that autonomy has yet to solve: occlusion — which is seeing beyond blind spots — prediction, and the coordination of a networked vehicle fleet.

The Trolley Problem is an ethical dilemma common to the self-driving car space. Here’s how it works: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?My guest, Ben Landen, hates the trolley problem. He thinks it fails to capture the true ethical dilemmas that we find in this space — and makes a lot of false assumptions about how self-driving vehicles actually make decisions.And so, that’s what we’re going to talk about today: the trolley problem, the problem with the trolley problem, and some alternative ethical dilemmas we should be asking instead.

Our guest today is Tim Varecka. Tim is the Director of Engineering and has been developing technology solutions for his entire career. Before joining Cyngn, he was in charge of new product development for Hexagon, an organization focused on the digital transformation of the mining industry. Now, at Cyngn, he takes his experience developing products for mining even further by helping mining operations integrate advanced autonomous systems into the vehicles they already own.In this conversation, we’ll be talking about the intersection of autonomous vehicles and mining, diving into its unique challenges and possibilities — and exploring how AV technology development in this space is a far different animal.

Our guest today is Biao Ma. Biao is a VP of Engineering and the head of autonomy at Cyngn. He has spent his career in the autonomy space. He brings engineering expertise to the entire stack, including perception, planning & control, mapping & localization, and simulation.  He was a software architect for Baidu’s autonomous driving division and has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.In this conversation, we’ll be talking about the five significant changes that have come to the Autonomous Vehicle sector in the last five years. Biao defines “massive” as changes that either (a) didn’t exist five years ago or (b) have improved by many, many multiples.

My guest today is a colleague of mine here at Cyngn, Ben Landen. Ben is the Senior Director of Product and Partnerships and, if we’re being honest — my boss. Ben has been in the self-driving space for most of his career. He was head of product & business at DeepScale, a startup that built computer vision solutions using deep learning. DeepScale was acquired by Tesla in 2019. Prior to that, Ben ran an automotive semiconductor product line at Maxim Integrated. Hundreds of millions of his products are embedded in vehicles all over the world.