Computer scientist Raquel Urtasun, Waabi's founder and CEO, says her company has created next-generation simulation for training self-driving cars.Waabi, a Toronto-based AI startup that came out of stealth last year, says it’s developed an advanced simulator that can train autonomous vehicles to handle nearly limitless types of driving conditions–in a virtual world–and do so faster and more thoroughly than self-driving rivals that prioritize road tests.
It’s the “most scalable, high fidelity cluster simulator that ever existed and, we believe, the key to unlocking self-driving technology at scale,” says Urtasan, who is also professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and a past chief scientist for Uber’s autonomous vehicle team.
The pace of development for the leading autonomous vehicle companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, General Motors-backed Cruise, Argo Ai, which is funded by Ford and Volkswagen, Amazon’s Zoox and robotic truck developer TuSimple, has been somewhat slower than anticipated though all the companies are making progress toward broader commercialization.
“We talk a lot about how you need a different brain for the self-driving vehicle for it to generalize to all the different things that might happen, but there is one more piece that you need which is a different way of testing, as well as training the system to really handle other situations,” she says. “The industry mainly does this by testing and driving millions of miles in the real world. This is very costly and it doesn't scale. ...
In a way I gather it is finally time to rethink what we rethought about next-generation self-driving car creating AI upstart simulations. Can they be used to simulate a self-driving car creating AI upstart simulation creating AI upstart? Or are they just for self-driving cars? 🤔