Jan 26, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

Even youngsters who have been surrounded by technology all their lives might be surprised at what Uber Technologies Inc. has developed.

“I always thought that someday a self-driving car would happen,” St. Thomas More School eighth-grader Kelly Prunzik said, “but not this soon.”

She and classmates had the opportunity for firsthand looks at a specially equipped, autonomously propelled Volvo XC-90 while learning more about Uber during the Bethel Park school’s STREAM – Science, Technology, Religion, Engineering, Arts and Math – Day on Jan. 25.

Kelly said she came away impressed with the massive effort that goes into making sure the computers that control self-driving vehicles do so safely and effectively, “how much time it takes to program them and how much information they put into the car.”

Uber vehicle design team leader Chris D’Eramo, a Bethel Park resident and Ringgold High School graduate, provided students with an overview of how such automotive marvels are possible, drawing comparisons to activities with which seventh- and eighth-graders are familiar:

“You guys don’t have quite the reference here, because you’re not quite driving yet. But who here plays a sport?”

After most of the students raised their hands, D’Eramo continued.

“Think especially about your team sports, maybe football or soccer or hockey or basketball. You, as a player, are in that environment. You’re surrounded by other players. You have a mission that you’re carrying the ball or moving the puck up ice, and you have to navigate your way around all these other people,” he said.

“A car has to navigate the same thing, right? But rather than maybe five other things in its environment, going relatively slowly, it’s surrounded by two-ton vehicles going 50 miles an hour,” plus contending with avoiding the likes of pedestrians crossing the road and trees, buildings and other stationary features to the side. “We have to create hardware and software that can navigate that world and make split-second decisions.”

With St. Thomas More’s middle school students contemplating career choices in the not-too-distant future, D’Eramo outlined some of the jobs and functions that play key roles in putting Uber’s driverless vehicles on the road, starting in Pittsburgh in 2016.

• Software development - “It’s one thing for you to write a program on your computer in class, but our computers, both back in the office as well as all the extra computers that we build and program inside the car, do a ton of things all at the same time,” he explained. “It takes a lot of people to do that programming for all the different functions we need to do.”
• Mapping - “Maybe your parents have a GPS in their car, or you use Google Maps or something like that. Those maps don’t just magically appear, right? Someone had to create those.” Maps must be developed for an autonomous vehicle, D’Eramo said, “so that when it drives out, it knows how to read and recognize what it sees.”
• Hardware development - “We’ve still not ever made a car from the ground up,” he said. “We didn’t invent a new car. We took existing cars and tore them apart, and we understood how they worked, which pieces we’d need and which pieces we didn’t, and we added our own pieces to make it do what it is we wanted it to do.”
• Operations
• - “It takes a lot of people to make this stuff happen,” D’Eramo explained, “not just to create the actual objects, but to make sure they are implemented in the city, and they get turned on the right days and go to the right destinations.”

Following his general presentation, D’Eramo answered questions while small groups of students went outside to check out an actual Uber vehicle.

“I thought it was really neat,” eight-grader Gianna Sacco said afterward. “Before, I never realized all the inside stuff, so that was really cool to see what goes on, other than seeing the car on the street driving.”

Principal Joseph Rosi said that the program represents a continuation of the school’s emphasis on the STREAM disciplines:

“We have been trying since I came board this summer to really get our kids exposed to 21st-century skills and learning opportunities.”