Welcome to Waabi World, the ‘ultimate simulator’ for autonomous vehicles

Raquel Urtasun, the former chief scientist at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, promised an “AI-centric approach” to autonomous vehicles when she founded her own company last year, Waabi. Now, she’s ready to deliver on that promise with the announcement of the company’s first product: a virtual world in which to test its autonomous vehicles called “Waabi World.” Urtasun says she doesn’t want to rely on a large fleet of vehicles driving millions of miles on public roads and gathering data in service of training AI systems to drive better and safer than humans. That’s expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately doesn’t capture the seemingly endless number of edge cases that could confuse a self-driving vehicle. Urtasun claims that... Continue reading…

Welcome to Waabi World, the ‘ultimate simulator’ for autonomous vehicles

Raquel Urtasun, the former chief scientist at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, promised an “AI-centric approach” to autonomous vehicles when she founded her own company last year, Waabi. Now, she’s ready to deliver on that promise with the announcement of the company’s first product: a virtual world in which to test its autonomous vehicles called “Waabi World.”

Urtasun says she doesn’t want to rely on a large fleet of vehicles driving millions of miles on public roads and gathering data in service of training AI systems to drive better and safer than humans. That’s expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately doesn’t capture the seemingly endless number of edge cases that could confuse a self-driving vehicle. Urtasun claims that...

Continue reading…