Design This Day | Episode 16

Are we ready for a driverless world?

Corey Clothier joins Teague Futurist Devin Liddell to talk about autonomous vehicles, building trust in driverless technology, and designing autonomy around real human needs. Corey is the Co-Founder and CEO of ARIBO Autonomous Solutions, where he helps governments and companies deploy autonomous technology in the real world.

Corey Clothier:
It was a little quiet on the bus and it was a family, two kids, mom and dad. And I said, "Well, what do you guys think?" And the dad goes, "About what?" I'm like, "About this shuttle, that it's a robot. It's an autonomous vehicle, essentially it's a robot." And he looked back and forth and I said, like, "It doesn't even have a steering wheel." He's like, "Hey, kids, look, this doesn't even have a steering wheel."

Devin Liddell:
Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want, and the people working right now to make those futures real. I'm your host, Devin Liddell. I'm a futurist at Teague. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between present challenges and future solutions. Today I'm speaking with Corey Clothier, a longtime leader in autonomous vehicles. Corey is the co-founder and CEO of ARIBO Autonomous Solutions, where he helps government agencies and private companies deploy autonomous tech in the real world. In this episode, Corey and I talk about autonomy as a shift in how systems work. Good design considers not just what machines can do, but also how they fit into the complex realities of human life. We explore what that looks like when the human element is a family on vacation, an airport manager struggling to hire staff, and a wounded veteran looking for care. And that's where we'll start today, at a military base in North Carolina. One of Corey's early autonomy projects started with a partnership with the US military. They brought him in to develop a long-term strategy for robotic ground vehicles on base. His first move was to find the pain points that autonomy was best suited to solve. He didn't have to look far.

Corey Clothier:
The very first pilot we did was at Fort Bragg, and it was a little, basically a converted golf cart that was acting like a shuttle to shuttle wounded warriors. They nicknamed it the Wounded Warrior Campus. It was a barracks campus right next to the hospital at Fort Bragg. Really state-of-the-art facilities. This hospital is massive. So what they found was that it's a short walk, it might be 200 meters, but many of the wounded soldiers and Marines couldn't walk there, so they had a shuttle. Well, because of funding and all of the typical silliness in bureaucracy, the shuttle had to stop at multiple stops before it went to the hospital. So it would be a twenty-minute ride to go 200 meters. And men and women are coming back from combat and they really, their bullshit meter was low or their threshold was low, and so they would just not go to appointments. They're like, "I'm not going to wait for this bus, or I'm not going to sit on the bus this long." And so they came up with the idea of could we go direct with these little autonomous shuttles? And that was what we piloted. And one of the first things was we had to design everything and do the risk assessments and all that typical systems engineering stuff and design the routes and design the program. And then it came to, now it's time to get permission from the commanding officer.

Devin Liddell:
Corey had to convince the commanding officer that transporting injured war fighters in an autonomous vehicle was a good idea. This was 2009, long before Waymos or even Uber was mainstream. So the idea that letting a vehicle drive around autonomously was a safe and reliable way to move war fighters around a base, let alone injured ones, was a stretch.

Corey Clothier:
The commanding officer can just say yes or no, and their word is law. So nobody had ever pitched it. And it was a two star general, a gentleman that I hadn't met before. And of course, I volunteered to do the presentation and ask for permission. And it was really funny because I was like, "I have no idea. He might throw me out of his office."

Devin Liddell:
Corey walked to the front of the room, made his presentation, and then looked at the general for direction. He held his breath.

Corey Clothier:
But he loved it and he was behind it, thought it was fantastic. So that was one big hurdle that we overcame. So there were multiple things that were really interesting. We worked with the patient advocacy team, the nurses, to really understand what their needs were and then see what we could do with autonomy to help get them from point A to point B. We had a nurse say, "I have a patient that is going to get into your shuttle bus and not remember why they got in. So how are you going to manage that?" And we're like, "We don't know. Let's figure it out." And another young soldier, he said, "A lot of times when I'm in a vehicle, my back locks up." And he goes, "I mean, locks up to a point that I can't stand. I can't move." He goes, "So if my back locks up on this little kind of extended golf cart, what do I do if there's no driver?" It was really, really interesting.

And we did the pilot with a safety operator on board because it was a fairly short-term one, but those things were really, really interesting to think through. And then we've been doing the same thing for now, 15, 16 years of really understanding what the capabilities of the technology are, and then also matching them to the rider needs and the system needs, and obviously a bit of design thinking involved in all of that.

We've been doing the same thing for now, 15, 16 years of really understanding what the capabilities of the technology are, and then also matching them to the rider needs and the system needs.

Devin Liddell:
This wasn't just a technical challenge, it was a design challenge. Corey's team had to think beyond the capabilities of the vehicle and focus on the needs of the people using it. Talking directly to patients and care teams changed requirements of the project. It pushed the team to consider things they hadn't planned for like memory loss and chronic pain. Building autonomy gets complex fast, especially when you start factoring in real people and real conditions, but the potential use cases are expansive. For Corey, those ideas go all the way to his time in the Marine Corps when he really could have used a robot or two. You were in the Marine Corps for 10 years, is that right?

Corey Clothier:
Yeah. Yep.

Devin Liddell:
When you think about your time as an active duty Marine Corps member, because you don't actually, technically, you're never an ex-Marine, right? You're once a Marine, you're always a Marine, right?

Corey Clothier:
That's right.

Devin Liddell:
Are there times when you look back on that time now and think about the autonomous vehicles you wished you had as an active duty member?

Corey Clothier:
Yeah. Anytime you have to carry anything, a really easy one. So there's a story there too. I enlisted first, then I became a Marine Corps officer. And all officers go to this thing called the basic school, and you learn how to be an infantry officer first. And then from your ranking at the basic school, you get to choose your full-time job. And of course, there were five pilot slots and a hundred people want those five pilot slots. I was lucky enough to get one of them. But all of that time at the basic school, it's like six, seven months of infantry officer training, the worst thing ever is carrying ammo. People don't realize. You watch movies and people are just going through hundreds, thousands of rounds. And if you've ever had to carry ammo, you're like, "Oh, what are you doing? Conserve, conserve.

Devin Liddell:
Slow down.

Corey Clothier:
That stupid box weighs 50 pounds and you have to carry it four miles. So an autonomous, and they've been working, actually they do have those now. There's multiple companies that have squad support vehicles of different types. Everybody knows BigDog from Boston Dynamics, the quadruped robot.

Devin Liddell:
Right. Totally.

Corey Clothier:
That was actually created as a squad support system, squad support robot first, and I think they put it to work. I don't know if it was about the same time, but either way, they found a lot of different use cases for it, but that was one of its primary missions when it was first developed.

Devin Liddell:
They also, I think Boston Dynamics also has a, I believe they have a mule as well, which has a similar background as well. You're right, it's like to carry and haul stuff.

Corey Clothier:
Yeah. There is one called the Mule, a wheeled vehicle. But yeah, carrying anything, that would be great.

Devin Liddell:
Building trust in a military setting is one thing. If the tech supports the mission, its value is obvious. But in public spaces, the challenge is more nuanced. 10 years after Corey helped pilot autonomous shuttles for wounded war fighters at Fort Bragg, the city of Las Vegas brought him in to do something very different. They wanted to launch a public-facing autonomous shuttle. This time the passengers weren't in the military. They were tourists, travelers, and families with kids.

Corey Clothier:
It was actually AAA, their innovation group came to me and I think she saw me speak somewhere. So we started some dialogue, and then pretty quickly after we met, she came back and she said, "We want to be the first ones to have a public available pilot with an autonomous shuttle. Can you help us pull that together?" So I called my colleague or friend in Vegas who was working on it and we put everybody together and everybody said yes, and that was it. We did a year-long pilot from 2018 to 2019 in downtown Las Vegas with one of the early autonomous shuttles.

Devin Liddell:
And what was the principle function of the shuttles? Was it meant to move people up and down the Strip or what was the use case?

Corey Clothier:
Really, the use case was it was a simple, it was novelty was the first use case. So for the riders, it was novelty, but for all of the stakeholders, it was education of how do you deploy these safely? What is the public sentiment before and after? It's one thing that they learned and were really pretty proud of is that I think they had over a 90%, I think it was 94 to 96% of the people who rode in that autonomous vehicle said they would do it again, and that they were comfortable. And that was what we found through the tons and tons of demos and pilots that we've done over the years.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And as you know, we've worked on a lot of autonomous vehicle programs as well, and we actually did one study where we worked specifically with riders who more or less kind of said, "I'll never ride in one," and that's how we recruited them. And then the interesting thing, and it's exactly to your point, is that once they actually ride in them, they change their tune in a heartbeat. I mean, it's instantaneous like, "Oh yeah, I'd absolutely do it and I'd do it again. No problem."

Corey Clothier:
It's funny because I've been doing this so long and been speaking publicly so long about this, as you start to see the things that I said five years ago, eight years ago become part of the daily just discussion or cliches. And I wasn't trying to be profound, but guys, it was probably 10 years ago I was talking, and it was a Q&A, I was on stage somewhere, and they were talking about that, trust and people's comfort. And I said, "What we find is when we do these pilots, people are intrigued for about 30 to 45 seconds. They ask one or two questions, how it works. How does it know where to go? Will it hit anything? The basic five questions. You answer one or two of their questions, and then they go back down to looking at their phone." And then I've heard that at conferences a hundred times since then.

People are intrigued for about 30 to 45 seconds. They ask one or two questions... You answer one or two of their questions, and then they go back down to looking at their phone.

We did an early pilot down here in South Florida. It was another autonomous shuttle, but different company, different operator, and it was in a planned community, really cool, really innovative. They'd had the grand opening day. I went down there, I helped them with a lot of the strategy. So they invited me for the grand opening day, which was a lot of fun. And we were taking rides and they were taking families around. And there was a little lull, it was a little quiet on the bus and it was a family, two kids, mom and dad. And I said, "Well, what do you guys think?" And the dad goes, "About what?" I'm like, "About this shuttle, that it's a robot. It's an autonomous vehicle, essentially it's a robot." And he looked back and forth and I said, like, "It doesn't even have a steering wheel." He's like, "Hey, kids, look, this doesn't even have a steering wheel." But again, they were fascinated for about a minute and then went back to just doing what, being a family and back to their day. Their threshold for fascination, it just cracks me up all the time.

Devin Liddell:
Actually, I mean, when you think about it, it's a really remarkable story in the sense that here, if I hear you correctly, you have a family that's boarded a shuttle, and they didn't actually even notice that the vehicle was absent of all of the kind of accoutrements that we associate with a vehicle, namely a steering wheel. And you actually kind of had to call attention to it. And then they're like, "Oh, well, that's interesting." You compare that with how, I'm always struck by how autonomous vehicles are presented in we could say early, but it's not really science fiction films. When you said steering wheel, it called to mind the Johnny Cabs in Total Recall.

Corey Clothier:
Johnny Cabs. Yeah.

Devin Liddell:
Right. And the interesting thing about the Johnny Cab is that, of course it's in a science fiction film, but it actually features an anthropomorphized thing, the Johnny, this robot, and it also has a steering wheel, none of which of course AVs would require.

Corey Clothier:
Yeah, exactly.

Devin Liddell:
Pilot programs are great at sparking curiosity and giving people the opportunity to try new technology out for themselves. But when autonomy moves beyond that testing phase and becomes part of everyday operations, it starts to reshape the whole system. We're beginning to see glimpses of this with robo taxis, but it's already well underway in industrial settings like ports and factories where autonomous systems are transforming how things run behind the scenes.

Corey Clothier:
A subset of it has been happening in warehouses and manufacturing facilities indoors. That's not the stuff that we work on. We work on things that are more outdoors, so we'll get to that. But mining, they saw the business case and the use case for mining 20 years ago, and they've been in use for 10, 12 years now. And ports and terminals, there's some terminals that are completely automated around the world, but only a few of them still. But they're running major ports with seven people. It's crazy. But that stuff is happening a lot right now. And this one, I can't say who the customer is, but they have one site, they have hundreds of golf carts, and it's too many for the site. Another site, they have thousands. And so thinking about how could we apply autonomy to reduce the fleet, that is really interesting. Instead of 400, you can service the riders, the people more efficiently in a better experience with like 75, something like that. I'm kind of making up the numbers, but they're ballpark numbers. I really think it's going to be less than half of what it currently is. But then now you're back to design. We don't need as much parking, we don't need as much charging, we don't need as much service and maintenance bays, blah, blah, blah. So interesting.

We don't need as much parking, we don't need as much charging, we don't need as much service and maintenance bays... I really think it's going to be less than half of what it currently is.

Devin Liddell:
Exactly. And that's pretty transformational. I mean, the list you just rattle off is transformative, right? I mean, it's not just about cutting the number of vehicles in half. It's actually about all those other pieces of infrastructure you don't have to have, all those things you don't have to manage.

Corey Clothier:
So if we look at a city, to me it's similar. I really think every vehicle is going to be autonomous. I don't know when. I know it's not going to be 20 years, but maybe 50. Definitely I would really think a hundred for sure. I mean, our technology pace, development pace and adoption is so fast now. It's just insane to me. But in a hundred years, I think everything is going to be autonomous.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The other thing that it sort of prompts of course is that the curb space in cities is an asset, it's a piece of infrastructure to be managed. And whenever I'm in a city, I see this a lot in the Bay Area in particular, but I see it here in Seattle too, when you look at a telephone pole and you'll see 10 different signs affixed to it. And when there are so many signs up there, it makes you realize that this is a city grappling with how to manage this as a piece of infrastructure. And it goes back to our discussion around autonomy actually changes that proposition because it moves it into this sort of phygital, digital and physical space where you don't actually have to manage it in the same way because the vehicles operate in totally different ways.

Corey Clothier:
Yep. That's a fantastic point. And I think that's the future, in my opinion, that is coming fast. And that's the way I've always viewed autonomy is that's just going to change the way we do physical work, at least on the driving side. And when you think of, like you were just saying, having those two work together, which is inevitable, it is already happening, but that's not a hard problem. This curb management is not a hard problem for AI. They can figure that stuff out better than we can, so let's let them do it.

Devin Liddell:
At Teague, we've worked on designing how autonomy supports daily life in cities. We've also explored more speculative concepts, curbside robots that sweep sidewalks overnight, shopping carts that follow you as you buy groceries, traffic intersection bots that help manage vehicles and protect pedestrians. These aren't science fiction concepts waiting for technology to catch up. The tech is here. But whether they show up in your neighborhood depends less on the tech itself and depends more on who's willing to make the leap. What are the things that the cities have in common that you're working with? What are the things that make them the same in terms of why they have an appetite for autonomy?

Corey Clothier:
It is the people. It is the people in leadership to me. You can present the best idea that's going to be game changing for a company, for a process, for a system, and then it's up to the person, the people. And frequently it's a person who's in charge. So I think that's it. If it's a city, it's the mayor. Does the mayor want to do this or don't they want to do it? And then, or the state. Michigan is really fascinating. I lived in Michigan forever. But Michigan has a chief mobility innovation officer, Justine Johnson. But just for them to invest in that position and then to do a global search to find the right person. And she's very talented, very creative. So that comes from the governor and the Michigan Department of Transportation and their creativity and their willingness to be innovative and lead.

And then I just met with this major city, one of our biggest cities, and they have done nothing. I mean, in the city, I think they've done nothing. In the state, they've done a couple little tiny projects. So they're way behind globally. And that's okay because I mean, the technology's just coming online commercially. But it comes from the leadership, and you find that bulldog, that man or woman that is willing to push and push and push to make this stuff happen. Those are the cities that are out in front. I think it's kind of fascinating because it's about people. It's not about the technology or autonomy. It's just somebody willing to take the risk to be innovative and to be a leader. Because I have so many conversations, and people love to be critics and to say things like, "That would never work here." I'm like, you can say that. Might not work while you're in office or while you have this job, but it's coming. We're not slowing it down.

It's about people. It's not about the technology or autonomy. It's just somebody willing to take the risk to be innovative and to be a leader.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, I'm curious about that too, bucket that largely under sort of trust issues. But when you think about reasons real or imagined that critics have in their minds around why they or their organization or their city or the airport is not ready for autonomy, what's sort of the major hit list? You mentioned one of them, but what are those big fears?

Corey Clothier:
It's partially US culture. Americans see robots as enemies, where other countries like Japan sees robots as friends. And it's kind of interesting because we do, and we've always treated it like that, and our sci-fi has always gone that way. Every robot turns evil in our media culture, pop culture. And that really kind of sticks is that when we talk to leaders that are kind of like my age range, and they don't understand the technology enough to trust it is really what happens. And then what we found really to be effective is we usually start with the top leadership and we get them educated and let them ask all of those questions. We have a list of frequently asked questions, and they're all related to how is this thing not going to go rogue, and how are we going to keep it from basically just encroaching on, it could be running amok in the street, in the city, or running amok on my airport and basically going on an active runway. That's what they're afraid of. So they just have to be educated and shown that this technology actually is safer than humans, some companies that are more mature, obviously, but they're safer than human drivers already. And I'm saying that broadly. I mean, it's not every single company, every single AV. But there hasn't been many autonomous vehicles that have hit anything in a while or very, very small numbers.

Devin Liddell:
We did a program years and years and years ago focused on forklift design, and so we did a lot of research into it and we spent a lot of time in warehouses. And one of my favorite stories of our time in those warehouses is we would find warehouse managers who would literally paint the fronts of forklifts at the beginning of every shift. And the reason they would paint the fronts of the forklifts was so that they could determine if the person on that shift was striking things.

Corey Clothier:
Wow.

Devin Liddell:
Because a lot of these forklifts come with fault alarms. And of course, you ask the driver and the driver will say, "No, no, no. I'm not hitting anything. I'm going over a crack in the concrete and it's tripping this alarm." But there was this intense distrust amongst humans. So it's an interesting parallel when we think about our distrust of machines, but yeah.

Corey Clothier:
Yeah. Well, that is fascinating. Yeah. Well, one of the feasibility studies we did to help build a business case is that we found they had $2 million a year in damage related to little minor accidents with their vehicles, their little industrial vehicles. So to think that that could go away was really attractive to them.

Devin Liddell:
The conversation around trust is still evolving. Even as autonomous tech becomes more common, we're still figuring out what we're comfortable handing over to machines and what still needs a human touch. For now, much of the adoption is happening for jobs that humans aren't well positioned to do or straight up don't want to do like cutting the grass at airports.

Corey Clothier:
So there's automated mowers, lawn mowers, that we call them automated mowers are one thing that we're working on, those little workhorses that I was mentioning that people aren't even aware that are going to happen. And it's resource tough, they just can't keep enough staff. So grass-cutting is a big one at airports. It was funny, I was just talking to one of our major airports, the director of operations or facilities and maintenance, I think is what his title was, he said, "I hire people and they don't show up to work." He goes, "And the grass keeps growing. I need help." When he needs help, he needs autonomous mowers. And I mentioned that to a West Coast airport, and they said, "No, we absolutely have that problem." The guy was really excited. He goes, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about." It's exactly the same thing. He goes, "I hire people and I can't get them to work." He goes, "So we do most of our mowing during prime operating hours because I can't get anybody to work after hours or at night."

He said, ‘I hire people and they don't show up to work.’ He goes, ‘And the grass keeps growing. I need help.’ When he needs help, he needs autonomous mowers.

Devin Liddell:
I'm laughing because, by the way, I mean I've totally love that autonomous mowers has come up. Listeners who are playing a bingo card will love that it also comes up because there's only about three things I think that have come up on a repeated basis on this podcast, and weirdly enough, autonomous mowers is one of them. We had a conversation with Paul Puopolo at Dallas-Fort Worth, and he absolutely talked at length about autonomous mowers, so I love that it's come up. The other two, by the way, are C-3PO and the robot dog in the episode of Black Mirror. We've gone way over, so I apologize for that, but this has been super, super fun. 

Devin Liddell:
That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.