Introducing the Sherpa
Last week Saad presented at the Autonomous Trucks conference at Düsseldorf, Germany. It was great sharing our ideas with the best in trucking like Daimler, Volvo, Scania amongst others.
As you notice above, we now have a trade name — Sherpa. A sherpa is not just a porter but an expert navigator in pretty challenging terrain. That’s us!
The video above starts with how we do our simulations. This is our custom simulator made using Unity3D. We can add various terrains, road types, lighting conditions and get a lot of virtual miles in our testing. The simulation also allows us to create interesting scenarios proactively rather than wait for them to happen in real life. We also get all the telemetry pretty nicely.
Next we showcase the vehicle on a stretch of road at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where we are testing (and have a research collaboration). That’s me next to a mechanical kill switch. Safety first! We simulated the same stretch in Unity and then were on the road. The interesting view is what the vehicle sees:
With the sensors it has, it ‘sees’ much more than just the camera. The map view within the above visualisation shows the map that the Sherpa has of the area it is operating in. We mapped it in advance with a remote controlled run of the Sherpa. The blue line is the path it planned given the destination. And the red line is what it is tracking in real time. It does pretty well. You can see the same in the U-Turn too. Here is just the map part of the same:
These tests are currently done on the Prototype Zero that we have made. Prototype One (which should look close to the rendering) is already under production and we are eagerly awaiting the same. Lot’s of tinkering at this stage means that we prefer testing with the bare chassis.
A good takeaway from the conference was that our efforts into making a unique and differentiated vehicle were well appreciated. This has been possible only due to our ownership of the full stack — from the vehicle, to the drive train and the autonomy stack. That really puts us in a pretty small club, especially amongst startups.
