Today, many vehicles benefit from some form of automated system, be it active cruise control, lane departure warning systems or forward collision warnings. These systems provide greater safety to drivers, can warn of impending dangers, and help prevent crashes. However, a fully autonomous vehicle that does not rely on any form of human involvement remains a distant prospect – but that may be about to change.
Raquel Urtasun, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, is the founder and chief executive of Waabi, a new Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) company that’s building the next generation of self-driving technology. According to Urtasun, the current problem with many autonomous vehicle startups is that they are often “robotics centric”, requiring humans to provide hard-coded solutions to the vast multiplicity of potential problems a vehicle may encounter on the road. Developers must constantly tweak and check their software stacks – the “brain” of the self-driving system – through real-world testing on public roads and highways. But this approach, Urtasun believes, is too complicated, resource intensive, and risky.
