It wasn’t long before Uber, a company that takes pride in its sharp-elbow ethos, hired away about 40 of the top robotics people from CMU and decided to collaborate with itself. Though the company said Pittsburgh was an ideal location because of its winding roads, hilly terrain and variable weather, the real draw was the opportunity to collaborate with Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where academic researchers affiliated with the country’s first PhD program in robotics had been working on autonomous vehicles for more than two decades. Two years ago, Uber announced it was starting a research facility to develop self-driving cars in Pittsburgh.
I can’t say much more about it because Uber wouldn’t let me in the door unless I signed an imposing confidentiality agreement, and Sarah reminded me several times, in her very friendly way, that the whole trip was “on background.” But I think I can reveal this: Though there was someone in the driver’s seat, for most of the trip the car drove itself. The ride took maybe 15 minutes and was uneventful except for a needless stop for a double-parked delivery truck outside one of the Strip’s many food stores and some hard braking when an impatient idiot passed us on the right. We went a few miles and then circled back on Smallman Street to the Uber warehouse, which is situated in a part of Pittsburgh that recently has become such a magnet for tech research that one think-tank maven described it to me as “where you really feel you’re in the 21st century.” The car turned toward downtown and headed into the bustling Strip District. I buckled up, and the Volvo headed out on a few blocks of 33rd Street that run under a hulking railroad trestle - an unsubtle symbol of the city’s heralded industrial past. I was about to have a very special Uber ride, and not just because it was free. We were in the parking lot of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, a converted restaurant-equipment warehouse just north of downtown.
On a blustery late-winter morning with a light whorl of snowflakes falling near the banks of the Allegheny River, Sarah, a friendly young PR person for Uber, opened the rear passenger door of a Volvo SUV that had so much electronic gear installed on the roof, it looked like it was wearing a crown.