Austin Russell. You may not have heard the name but he is the young billionaire who is turning out to be one of the most important links in the success of autonomous driving. We look at Mark Zuckerberg and say, “Oh, that young billionaire.” Here’s a 25-year-old who is changing the world of cars.
Making automated cars safe
Unlike the Facebook chief, Russell, who’s worth $2.4 billion, makes hardware. Luminar, his company, makes a sensor that uses a technology called lidar (pronounced LIE-dar) or light detection and ranging. The important technology uses near-infrared light to detect objects around it and, in the process, creates high-resolution scans of thousands of data points many times a second.
The advantage lidar enjoys is how precise can be the three-dimensional images — from cars to trees to cyclists — that get produced, under all kinds of lighting conditions. Autonomous car designs rely on inputs from the video camera, ultrasonic sensors and radars but lidar can’t be deceived by shadows or bright sunlight. (Apple’s iPhone Pro 12 and iPhone 12 Pro Max also employs lidar technology.)
Lidar sensors emit pulses that are invisible to the human eye. Millions of light pulses are emitted every second, which hit an object and return to the sensor. The data evolves real-time.
“The whole point is that it’s easy to make an automated car that’s safe 99 per cent of the time. There are 1.3 million lives lost on roads every year [globally]. It’s crazy. Every single year. It’s pretty wild,” he has told The Times, London.
Of course, lidar doesn’t drive the car. There is a need of some excellent software programmes to run the show. But nobody can deny the importance of the technology he is driving. Over the years, Russell has not only brought down the cost of lidar units but also the size.
Not everyone is sold on the technology, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who likes to use a combination of radar, sensors and digital video cameras. At a press conference in 2019, Musk said: “Lidar is a fool’s errand. Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
Russell hopes that by 2025 lidar will be considered a standard requirement for most high-end vehicle. “We’re working with 50 commercial partners. And pretty much all of them wholeheartedly disagree with Elon.”
Quick on the uptake
The 25-year-old has always been a quick learner. The six-foot-four man is said to have memorised the periodic table of elements when he was two years old and rewired his Nintendo DS game console into a crude mobile phone when he was in the sixth grade. And at age 13, he got a patent for an underground water recycling system that catches sprinkler water and saves it for future gardening to reduce wastewater.
Though he got admitted to Stanford to study physics, he dropped out after winning a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship stipend for his lidar concept and soon enough he obtained a driver’s license and, of course, founded Luminar.
Asked by The Verge as to how long until we can buy a car without a steering wheel, he thinks it will be in the early 2030s, “realistically” (of course, with a few caveats).
Boy wonder? Of course! We forgot to mention that a younger version of him had invented a holographic computer keyboard.