The world meets in Stuttgart

Yesterday the 5th Connected Autonomous Driving Meetup was held  in Stuttgart once again, this time in the Connectory and with special guest David Silver, head of Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program, and once again sponsored by Bosch, thank you very much at this point and to Fouad, Rainer and all the others for the organisation.

 

As I live near Frankfurt and a train is the fastest way from here to Stuttgart, I had to include some buffer for the trip … and as the train was perfectly in time… I had the opportunity to visit Stuttgart’s city center. In difference to that huge hole right at the rail station really a beautiful city:

 

I arrived at the Connectory at 5pm, by far too early, but Rainer, Oliver, Fouad and the others were already eagerly preparing the whole technique.

At about 5:45pm, so 15 minutes before the official start at 6pm the room was still nearly completely empty and I slowly began to worry we would have an evil now-show rate, but within these remaining minutes every minute like 7-8 people began to show up so at about 6pm we had an insane amount of nearly 100 guests, so more than three times as much as at the last Meetup.

Fun fact: While waiting for the others a group arrived which I thought would also be part of the Meetup, so I greeted them. They were though just waiting for a guide for a guided tour through the offices ;-). And because I welcomed them so warmly they eagerly waited for ME to start guiding them ;-). The real guide fortunately showed up shortly afterwards.

Short afterwards David Silver, Aaron, Tine and Leah from Udacity showed up and David used the time until the official start of the presentations for a short talk with all people around, awesome. 🙂 As we are also planning to equip a car with sensors for map quality assurance services (more passive than to let it drive itself) I used the chance to ask for a preferable company to also get access to odometer, speedometer & similar data.
David proposed Lincoln and Honda, but also had to confirm my fear that it won’be “easy going”. Also I got the chance for this awesome photo, thank you very much, was an honor to meet you:

Aimed with drinks and Pizza all were prepared for the first talk by Mirko Franke, Bosch, Director Engineering System & Functions for Automated Driving who gave a short overview of the current state of development and the evolutionary (personal cars) and revolutionary (perfectly equipped, potentially a bit more expensive, but there for shared cars) development and the challenges over the next years at Bosch.

Now David gave a detailed insight into the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program, a 9 month course which conveys all basic knowledge about computer vision, sensor fusion and all the other main component of Self-Driving Cars. Also he brought a great video about the pioneering cohort with him. Rainer Bareiss, the founder of this Meetup is one of these pioneers :).

More details about the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree you can find here:
https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nanodegree–nd013

After a very intensive Question & Answer round it was decided to simply use all the tables, spread the beer and have a nice evening. We had a really great evening with many great talks between all these ambitious people and in this case I think images do really say more than words:

See you at the next Meetup in May:

https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Connected-Autonomous-Driving/


Thanks once again to Bosch for sponsoring this event once again.
If you would like to join Bosch, write an e-mail to this address:

automated.driving (at) de.bosch.com