MAUMEE, Ohio, Feb. 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Dana Incorporated (NYSE: DAN) today announced that Chris Clark has been named senior vice president of global operations, effective today. Dana Incorporated logo. (PRNewsFoto/Dana Incorporated) In this role, Mr. Clark is responsible for leading global manufacturing operations across Dana’s more than 150 major facilities with an emphasis on… Continue reading Dana Names New Senior Vice President of Global Operations
Tag: Mobility
This Year, Autonomous Trucks Will Take to the Road With No One on Board
Original Article
The Station: Uber slurps up Drizly, Ford doubles its EV budget and Rad Power Bikes plots an expansion
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi friends and new readers, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to… Continue reading The Station: Uber slurps up Drizly, Ford doubles its EV budget and Rad Power Bikes plots an expansion
Coffee Talk: Dr. Allan Steinhardt
Each week, we sit down with a different member of AEye’s leadership team to discuss their role, their view of challenges and opportunities in the industry, and their take on what lies ahead.
This week, we talk with our Chief Scientist, Dr. Allan Steinhardt.
1. You have an illustrious career. You are an IEEE fellow and former Chief Scientist at DARPA and recipient of the US Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, among other accolades. What prompted you to join a startup at this stage of your career?It wasn’t something I planned to do – It was opportunistic. When I left DARPA as a Chief Scientist, I became Chief Scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton and we built a Science and Technology business, where we consulted with Chief Technology Officers at many of the Fortune 100 companies. I was consulting for Airbus at the time. Paul Eremenko was the CEO of Airbus Silicon Valley Innovation Center and a former colleague of mine at DARPA. He wanted me to come to the Silicon Valley and identify interesting sensor companies for autonomous flight. I interviewed a lot of companies in the marketplace, and was really impressed with AEye. I saw it as being very similar to some of the more innovative, cutting-edge sensing concepts that I had seen from radar, and so I recommended an investment. Airbus invested, Luis invited me to join the board, and, later, to join the company. Actually, all three of us on the technical advisory board – myself, John Stockton and Blair LaCorte – quit the board to join the company, which I think is pretty unusual in the Valley.
The startup opportunity intrigued me, as I saw it as an opportunity to have a different kind of impact, to change the world through changing the kinds of products that are available. I was involved with some of the early investments in autonomy and LiDAR through DARPA, and like many others amongst my peers I was drawn to the autonomous vehicle commercial market as a result of the DARPA Grand Challenge I interacted with some of the early DARPA internet pioneers, guys like Dr. Vint Cerf who went on to do really cool things in industry as the internet was being born commercially. I see autonomous cars as being a similar disruptive technology. Doing the kind of work that I did at DARPA, but on a commercial scale, seemed very exciting to me.
2. Tell us about your role at AEye.I have a couple of roles: one of them has to do with the intellectual property, the patent portfolio. I also work closely with our CMO to articulate our value proposition to a non-technical audience. I had a very similar responsibility at DARPA, interfacing with various staffers and congressional committees that needed to articulate the value proposition. I also am intimately involved with the engineers on a daily basis as a mentor, as well as leading brainstorming. I’m pleased that over a dozen of our engineers have been involved in patent generation, so we have a very broad team of innovators. I also work very closely with the system engineers, CTO and chief engineer, and make sure that, when it comes to bids and product specifications, we have compliance in terms of the documentation or the articulated performance.
3. Can you expand upon your teamwork, and how you collaborate on the technical innovation that you’re leading?There are four groups that I work with. I work quite a bit with the software team, because we have a very agile system, and almost every aspect is subject to software control. We have three levels of feedback on the steering mirrors. Everything has software control parameters to it, so you really can’t just do the engineering. I work very tightly with the software team.
From the engineering team’s perspective, I work mostly with the architects and the system engineers that are trying to characterize and model the system. And then I do a fair amount of interaction with what we call our field application engineers, which are the people that have the most experience with operating our LiDAR as a LiDAR, as opposed to testing individual components of it, and they tend to have the deepest level of expertise and insight into potential ways to improve or to innovate on the system. I spend a lot of time with them and they work very closely with the marketing team, as well.
There’s an interesting synergy between marketing and the scientists. It’s sort of analogous in the military. I found I was much more comfortable working with and talking to what we refer to as operators like Special Forces or other “tip of the spear” kinds of military operatives, than the system engineering acquisition shops, which is typically where you think of engineering taking place. The reason I enjoyed that was that there’s a lot of innovation. The innovation doesn’t stop with the military. Once you have a system, innovation begins, so I’ve taken that philosophy here at AEye, and I think it’s really paying dividends.
4. Having funded hundreds of radar and LiDAR projects over the years, what do you think are some of the most interesting applications occurring right now?Some of these, I think, might be a little surprising, like geology and limb prosthetics.
LiDAR has been used as a lie detector. You can do 3D mapping of the flow of blood in the brain: the blood flows in the brain to replenish areas where there’s been a great deal of activity, so by looking to see whether activity is present in areas which are associated with imagination versus memory recall, you can infer whether a person is telling the truth or not. That science has also moved into thought-controlled prosthetics where soldiers that have lost limbs have functioning robotic limbs that are controlled by thought, and it’s based on that early work. Those advancements have been very satisfying to me personally.
There are two applications that stand out to me in the world of radar. One of the things that we use radio telescopes for, which is like the passive form of radar, is to measure continental drift. We can measure the drift of continents at the seven millimetre scale, and the way we do it is we steer radar dishes at the Big Bang and take recordings of the radio static from the Big Bang. By analyzing subtle shifts in how that signal is changing, we’re able to measure precisely the drift of continents, which has really changed the nature of earthquake prediction.
Another one is weather prediction. We have a system where you have different radars on different satellites, and you deliberately shoot from one satellite and receive on another through the air. By measuring the fingerprint of the signal, you’re able to get the moisture content in the air along that straw of atmosphere, and then you go through lots and lots of processing and you come up with a three dimensional map of the entire moisture content of the globe. A lot of the work on climate change and weather prediction is based on that.
5. In addition to your scientific achievements at DARPA, Booz Allen, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and BAE/Alphatech, you’ve been a professor (Cornell), and a prolific author and speaker on space, land, and naval-based electronic warfare, sensor, and radar systems. What do you feel personally have been your most important contributions to science?I am an IEEE Fellow, and received recognition from the Defense Department on what’s called Space Time processing, which is looking deeply into how you combine data from a lot of different positions in space and time, and pull it all together. It’s kind of physics meets computer science and math. So I’d say that’s probably my most important contribution. A true scientist would say, “Well, Steinhardt, he’s not a scientist, he’s an engineer,” so it all depends on who you talk to. I’m not a physicist. I’m not a biologist. But there are scientists that use a lot of the tools that my teams have developed.
6. Finally, what’s your favorite mode of transportation?It would have to be mountain boots and a rope and an ice ax, when I’m moving up a ridge somewhere with my daughter, who loves to do mountaineering with me. My dad was a mountaineer, too. I also love sailing, and biking. I love being active. I use cars because I have to get to work. But I don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Gee, I can’t wait to to turn the key in my car.”
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SoftBank’s Vision Fund posted a record $8 billion profit in the third quarter as its bets on DoorDash and Uber paid off
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Amazon eyes global ride aboard Mahindra Electric’s Treo Zor EV
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Knorr-Bremse bundles e-mobility expertise into new eCubator division
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30 years under the banner of the three-pointed star – Mercedes-Benz plant in Ludwigsfelde celebrates a special anniversary
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February 2021
Ludwigsfelde, Germany
From truck to van – a fresh start after the fall of the wall Economic power and security for the region Changes in production through the years Ludwigsfelde, Germany – Exactly thirty years ago, an LN2 truck was the first Mercedes-Benz vehicle to roll off the production line in Ludwigsfelde, which is now Daimler's third largest van production plant in the world. Today, about 200 of the so-called open model series of the Sprinter (chassis, platform vehicle, tractor head) are manufactured daily, well over 50,000 per year. Over 820,000 vehicles of the brand with the star have now been produced at the Brandenburg plant and sold all over the world.
From truck to van – a fresh start after the fall of the wall
The truck with model designation LN2 led the way, rapidly followed by the first van, the T2, which was also built from 1991 until 1996. The T2 was followed by the Vario and finally the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, the open model variants of which have been in production in Brandenburg since 2006. Currently, in Ludwigsfelde the third Sprinter generation with its derivatives the wind runner and the traction head are being produced. These form the basis for many different types of vehicle, for example ambulances, camper vans or refrigerated vans.
Economic power and security for the region
Three decades ago, the plant in Ludwigsfelde was one of the largest and therefore most important industrial employers in the region. Brandenburg's Prime Minister Dr Dietmar Woidke on the occasion of the anniversary: “What began 30 years ago has become a success story. I am glad that the former GDR vehicle construction in Ludwigsfelde was stabilised and expanded thanks to the entry of Mercedes-Benz after 1990. Ludwigsfelde is thus one of the success stories of German unity. With the traditional Stuttgart-based company, Brandenburg has a long-standing reliable and strong economic partner. The state government is aware of the current difficult situation of companies and their employees in times of the Corona pandemic. We are doing everything we can to ensure that the framework conditions continue to be good so that we can get off to a good start after the foreseeable end of the pandemic. And of course this also applies to the Sprinter production in Ludwigsfelde. Last summer I visited the factory. And I got a picture of the sprinter production under corona conditions with special protective measures. The commitment of the workforce and the high demands placed on the safety and health of the employees at the plant are impressive.”
In previous years, Mercedes-Benz Vans has invested a great deal in the future of the plant, a total of around one billion euros. “The plant is a mainstay in our current worldwide production network,” said Dr Ingo Ettischer, Head of Production for Mercedes-Benz Vans. “We have already set the course in recent years to set up Ludwigsfelde for the future, particularly in view of the transformation to electric and connected vans. Plus there's the increasing digitisation of production. All of this requires innovative power, expertise and a professional approach – as the Ludwigsfelde team impressively proves every day.”
The most important capital: the team
Today, more than 2,000 people work for Mercedes-Benz in Ludwigsfelde, most of them on the production of the latest generation of the Sprinter. “There is one decisive factor that determines our sustainable success here at the plant and that is our team,” said the Plant Manager and Managing Director of Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH, Dr Markus Keicher. “Only with the right people can you produce vehicles successfully over such a long period of time. You need a skilled and practised team that gives its very best every day so that vehicles can be produced to customers' specifications and hold their own on the roads of the whole world – for years and years.”
Changes in production through the years
Production has changed considerably over the past thirty years and the factory has been constantly developed. Thanks to its efficiency and numerous innovations, Ludwigsfelde is now one of the Group's most modern sites. In recent years, digitisation has increased considerably in the production of Mercedes-Benz Vans, in the form of driverless transport systems, exoskeletons, or the use of RFID chips in logistic processes.
Additional quotes:
Changes in production through the years
Steffen Seidel, Head of Series Preparation at the Ludwigsfelde plant, has been at the works for almost 30 years and said of changes in production: “When we built the first vehicles in 1991, the production plant looked very different from the way it does today. Most of the manual section of the tasks has been replaced to a large extent by a far greater degree of automation. Today we make considerably more than 200 vehicles per day in two shifts, something that would have been hard to imagine thirty years ago. This was made possible thanks to the innovative power of the staff, new production technologies, by improving the ergonomics at the workplace, and by constantly improving the series preparation. Here the latest methods of digitisation, parts manufacture, bodies for pre-series vehicles, and training methods for production staff are constantly being added to and improved. With it, highly complex and extremely challenging product start-ups, such as the various Sprinter generations, were successfully mastered at the Ludwigsfelde plant. I personally am fascinated by the field of tension between increasingly sophisticated product developments and putting them into practice in our factory in an increasingly digitalised world.”
Combined growth – Ludwigsfelde and Mercedes-Benz
Andreas Igel, the Mayor of Ludwigsfelde, said on the subject of Mercedes-Benz's roots in the area, “We have achieved a lot together, and the history of the town of Ludwigsfelde is inseparably linked with the success story of the factory – not just over the past thirty years. The factory has contributed to making Ludwigsfelde an attractive location for its inhabitants over the past decades, and to helping the town and the region to develop constantly. We as a town are proud of this long-standing, reliable partnership and we would like to congratulate the management and the entire staff on thirty years of 'Mercedes-Benz Made in Ludwigsfelde'! We will do everything we can to further strengthen this partnership in the interests of the employees and of the people of the region,” promised Igel.
Press Contact
Thomas C. Rosenthal
Global Technology Communications Mercedes-Benz Vans – Future Transportation & adVANce
thomas_christian.rosenthal@daimler.com
Tel: +49 176 30933075
Silke Walters
Manager Global Business Communications Mercedes-Benz Vans
silke.walters@daimler.com
Tel: +49 176 30909308
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Brandenburg's Prime Minister Dr. Dietmar Woidke visited Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde in 2020. In the picture (from left to right): Dr. Dietmar Woidke, Prime Minister of brandenburg; Dr. Markus Keicher, Site Manager Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde.
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30 years Mercedes-Benz from Ludwigsfelde
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Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde: Aerial view of the plant site in 2020
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Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde: Aerial view of the plant site in 2020
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Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde company sign
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Production at the Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde plant
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Production at the Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde plant
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Celebration on the occasion of a million commercial vehicles from Ludwigsfelde in 2010
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Line sequence of the first Mercedes-Benz at the Ludiwgsfelde plant on 2/8/1991 (Werner Niefer, Chairman of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz AG 1989-93, Manfred Stolpe, Prime Minister of the State of Brandenburg 1990-2003)
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Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde: Aerial view of the plant site in 1997
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The founding of the Mercedes-Benz plant 30 years ago was celebrated in Ludwigsfelde at the south gate on February 01, 2021.
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30 years Mercedes-Benz from Ludwigsfelde
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