Racing Robocars

For a century the car industry has used racing to drive innovation. But with self-driving cars, it’s not happening. Companies are more concerned about embarrassing and expensive failures than speed and nimbleness, so much so that the biggest risk of robocars on the roads is slowing and blocking traffic. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the big robocar makers to put their pedal to the metal — we can do it ourselves. Ten years ago, Chris Anderson helped kickstart the modern drone industry by adding the letters “DIY” to what was until then the sole domain of governments and aerospace companies, and today we have millions of DIY drones in the air. Now the same thing is happening with autonomous cars, where for less than $200 you can make your own small autonomous car that uses the same kinds of sensors and AI code as the full-size one, but can be used safely indoors. In this presentation Chris will talk about what DIY Robocars can teach us about autonomous cars, how to build and race them and the next steps in sensors and software that will allow them to beat the fastest humans by the end of the year.

Presenter

Chris Anderson is the CEO of 3DR, founder and chairman of the Linux Foundation’s Dronecode Project, and founder of the DIY Drones and DIY Robocars communities, including the ArduPilot autopilot project. From 2001 through 2012 Chris was the Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine. Before Wired he was with The Economist for seven years in London, Hong Kong and New York.

Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.

Awards include: Editor of the Year by Ad Age (2005). Named to the “Time 100,” the newsmagazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2007). Loeb Award for Business Book of the Year (2007). Wired named Magazine of the Decade by AdWeek for his tenure (2009). Time Magazine’s Tech 40 — The Most Influential Minds In Technology (2013). Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers (2013).

Chris founded GeekDad, BookTour and a few other companies now lost in the mists of time.  His background is in science, starting with studying computational physics and doing research at Los Alamos and culminating in six years at the two leading scientific journals, Nature and Science.

In his misspent youth Chris was a bit player in the DC punk scene and, amusingly, a band called REM (not that one).

Chris lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and five kids.

Presenter(s)