Udacity and Mercedes-Benz’s North American R&D lab have developed curriculum for a sensor fusion nanodegree, the latest effort by the online education startup to meet high demand for skills related to autonomous vehicles and to duplicate the success it has had with its self-driving vehicle engineer program.
Registration for the sensor fusion degree opened Tuesday.
Udacity specializes in “nanodegrees” on a range of subjects which have AIlearning marketing, VR and computer vision.
The new sensor fusion nanodegree is one of the developments and changes enacted by Udacity’s co-founder Sebastian Thrun as part of a larger turnaround plan without hurting growth aimed at costs in line with revenue.
The sensor fusion program consists of four courses and is intended to take to complete. Students will learn about lidar obstacle detection, radar obstacle detection, camera and lidar data combination, and Kalman Filters. Should be able to work with radar lidar, and cameras — sensors that are used on the vast majority of vehicles.
A group of MBRDNA employees are enrolled in the car program as part of an Enterprise training pilot.
“There’s no such thing as self-driving car generalists,” Thrun told TechCrunch. “Companies are currently looking for something specific. Along with the most popular thing around right now is sensor fusion. ”
And despite the AV industry dipping into the “trough of disillusionment” Thrun said there’s still a lot of demand for skilled employees.
“It’s easier to get a job now than raise money from investors,” Thrun said. “All of these companies like Zoox and Aurora, Waymo, Cruise and Tesla are hiring like crazy. ”
For instance, GM’s self-driving car unit Cruise announced in March plans to hire hundreds of employees through the end of the year, doubling its technology staff.
Udacity and Sunnyvale,Calif.,-based Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America (MBRDNA) have partnered on nanodegree applications before. In 2016, the two companies collaborated on a self-driving vehicle engineer nanodegree — a program that brought thousands of students and would lead to the spinout of AV startup Voyage. More than 21,000 students from 120 countries have enrolled in that program.
Udacity doesn’t split graduation rates for individual programs, which makes it difficult to assess how many individuals have completed the self-driving vehicle engineer degree or have gone on to jobs in the field.
Udacity has reported that a 34 percent graduation rate over its more than 30 nanodegree programs. The business also notes that nanodegree program graduates have landed new jobs with Audi, BMW, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Lyft, NVIDIA, and Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes employs over 40 nanodegree program graduates globally, based on Udacity.
Udacity other nanodegree related to the industry and flying cars.
In April, Udacity is restructuring its operations and laid off about 20 percent of its workforce. Udacity currently employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors. The business has also added new services aimed at retaining students, including a mentorship program that was technical. Since May 1, each Udacity student has access to expert reviewers, mentors, career coaches, and learning plans.
The business experienced growth in 2017 and revenue that increased 100 percent year-over-year thanks to a popular applications like its car and learning nanodegrees. And the quantity slowed and failed to draw the attention and enrollment as its predecessors, while new programming was added in 2018. Meanwhile, costs ballooned. Following CEO Vishal Makhijani left in October and Thrun stepped in. Thrun, who founded Google’s moonshot factory X, is also CEO of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk Corp..
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