Fascinating read. The flaw in this plan was obvious: a motorcycle can’t stand up on its own. It needs a rider to balance it—or else a complex, computer-controlled system of shafts and motors to adjust its position every hundredth of a second. ... When Levandowski went to the Berkeley faculty with his idea, the reaction was, at best, bemused disbelief. His adviser, Ken Goldberg, told him frankly that he had no chance of winning. Anthony is probably the most creative undergraduate I’ve encountered in twenty years, he told me. But this was a very great stretch. Levandowski was unfazed. Over the next two years, he made more than two hundred cold calls to potential sponsors. He gradually scraped together thirty thousand dollars from Raytheon, Advanced Micro Devices, and others. (No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project.) Then he added a hundred thousand dollars of his own. In the meantime, he went about poaching the faculty’s graduate students. He paid us in burritos, Charles Smart, now a professor of mathematics at M.I.T., told me. Always the same burritos. But I remember thinking, I hope he likes me and lets me work on this. Levandowski had that effect on people. His mad enthusiasm for the project was matched only by his technical grasp of its challenges—and his willingness to go to any lengths to meet them. At one point, he offered Smart’s girlfriend and future wife five thousand dollars to break up with him until the project was done. He was fairly serious, Smart told me. She hated the motorcycle project. There came a day when Goldberg realized that half his Ph.D. students had been working for Levandowski. They’d begun with a Yamaha dirt bike, made for a child, and stripped it down to its skeleton. They added cameras, gyros, G.P.S. modules, computers, roll bars, and an electric motor to turn the wheel. They wrote tens of thousands of lines of code. The videos of their early test runs, edited together, play like a jittery reel from The Benny Hill Show: bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over—more than six hundred times in a row. We built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark, Smart told me. It’s like one of my colleagues once said: You don’t understand, Charlie, this is robotics. Nothing actually works.’ Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code. They’d thought that stability was a complex, nonlinear problem, but it turned out to be fairly simple. When the bike tipped to one side, Krasnov had it steer ever so slightly in the same direction. This created centrifugal acceleration that pulled the bike upright again. By doing this over and over, tracing tiny S-curves as it went, the motorcycle could hold to a straight line. On the video clip from that day, the bike wobbles a little at first, like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field—as if guided by an invisible hand. They called it the Ghost Rider. click-to-read-mo.re/p/47CT
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 10:29:45 +0000
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