Lessons ideal for Jetsons
Udacity offers courses on flying cars, drones and building robot vehicles
Flying cars seem like Jetsons sci-fi. But soon people can take classes on how to build them.
Udacity, a Mountain View online educational company focused on programming and robotics, will offer a course early next year covering basics of autonomous flight, with hands-on projects such as flight simulation and deploying code on a small drone. Like the company’s other programs, it will lead to a nanodegree, a certificate earned after mastering curricula targeted at specific job skills.
Udacity is also adding an introductory course on building autonomous cars, for those who lack the programming chops for its higher-level course on the subject. Ride-hailing service Lyft will sponsor 400 full scholarships to the introductory course for people from underserved communities.
Udacity founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun has himself transitioned from autonomous cars to flight: He pioneered selfdriving cars at Google over a decade ago, and now, in addition to his Udacity work, he runs Kitty Hawk, a company started by Google cofounder Larry Page to make flying cars.
Thrun will work with Nicholas Roy, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and other notables to develop the flying cars curriculum, which will also cover drones. Students will learn the skills to build autonomous flight vehicles “that can reliably complete complex missions in urban environments,” Roy writes in a blog post. The cost and term length have not yet been set. Many Udacity courses run for months and cost hundreds or a few thousand dollars.
Several companies have declared that they are within a couple of years of releasing flying cars — also called vertical takeoff and landing craft, which are a kind of hybrid of planes and helicopters. Besides Kitty Hawk, they include San Francisco’s Uber; A3, the Silicon Valley arm of Airbus; Slovakia’s AeroMobil; Germany’s eVolo; China’s EHang; and Massachusetts’ Terrafugia.
A year ago, Udacity began a self-driving nanodegree program that largely attracts seasoned software engineers. More than 10,000 students from 50 countries have enrolled, out of 43,000 applicants. The new introductory course is designed to appeal to people with minimal programming experience, and Udacity will guarantee graduates admission into the more advanced self-driving-car program.
Lyft, which recently said it would work on self-driving-car development at a new Palo Alto facility, said it will pick up the four-month course’s $800 tab for 400 students over the next year. Lyft aims to have hundreds of engineers at its facility by the end of 2018 and said hiring is going strong.
“We were looking for ways to bring more people into the fold,” said Raj Kapoor, Lyft chief strategy officer. Lyft’s scholarships will go to people from “any group which is underrepresented in tech,” he said, citing women, people of color and the LGBT community as examples.
“Self-driving is an industry that’s very young; there’s not a lot of expertise because it just got invented,” Kapoor added. “This is a lot like the early days of mobile when everyone was looking for engineers who could create mobile apps and there weren’t many. Udacity makes the process easier of bringing people up to speed.”
The involvement of Thrun, a venerated figure in the self-driving world, “is one reason Udacity was able to hit the ground running and get so much interest,” Kapoor said.
Udacity’s more-advanced self-driving nanodegree consists of three four-month courses, each $800. The first cohort, who started last year, will graduate in mid-October. About 60 students have already found jobs in the industry, the company said.
Megha Maheshwari wanted to work on selfdriving cars because she was attracted to the innovation and the potential to benefit society. An accomplished programmer, she already had worked on human-car interfaces for an automaker, but she needed more specialized knowledge to break into autonomous cars.
So she signed up with Udacity for its self-driving nanodegree in January, shortly after moving to Silicon Valley from Singapore.
“It was organized to give a very, very good understanding and detailed ideas,” she said.
There weren’t many other ways to learn about self-driving, short of graduate programs at universities like Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Stanford that teach related subjects.
She started off spending eight hours a day on the first course, learning about deep vision and computer architecture, in addition to interacting with other students on a Slack channel and through Bay Area meetups. (Udacity students live all around the world, but some may arrange in-person meetings.) She enjoyed projects, such as teaching the car to detect its lane by viewing stripes and markers on the road.
After completing one four-month class, she landed a job as an autonomous driving engineer at Volvo’s R&D Silicon Valley Tech Center in Mountain View. She’s continued with the second class, and soon will take the third one. She puts in a couple of hours of coursework a day after work and more time on weekends.
“The Udacity program was just the right fit to get me into the self-driving industry,” she said.