Dive Brief:
- Self-driving technology company Waabi plans to fully launch without a driver autonomous trucks in 2025, per a press release also stating that the industry is reaching new technological frontiers.
- The announcement coincides with a $200 million capital injection led by Uber and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. The new money will help grow its business and workforce in Canada and the US
- “Waabi is well positioned to launch driverless trucks in Texas, expand driverless operations into new geographies and transform the supply chain,” the company said in the statement.
Dive Insight:
when Waabi launched its plans for self-driving trucks from Toronto in 2021, the company noted that artificial intelligence could make a difference. With funding up, the company now stands out how he expects to develop genetic artificial intelligence in transportation.
Founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun said a blog post that for the AV industry, million-mile testing “is nowhere near what would be required to provide the rigorous evidence needed to make a comprehensive safety case.”
While the company is testing its technology on public roads in Texas through field trips with partners, Waabi is also developing its technology, particularly with simulations.
People building a self-driving system can create an overly complex approach that doesn’t generalize to all situations that happen on the road, Urtasun said. in a video. Instead, Waabi seeks to move away from this approach by “embedding an artificial intelligence production model to learn from the world unsupervised. This means there is no human intervention.”
Urtasun said the company is developing an artificial intelligence production model that observes the environment, learns what is appropriate and responds to new and unfamiliar situations.
“Waabi has pioneered a unified end-to-end artificial intelligence system that is capable of human reasoning, allowing it to generalize to any situation that may occur on the road, including those it has never seen before,” the company said in the news release.
With the technology capable of reasoning, “the system requires significantly less training data and computational resources compared to other end-to-end approaches,” the company said.
Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics are also pursuing plans to remove the safety guides, eyeing launch strips in Texas as an initial focus.