Computer Vision News - November 2021

2 Summary 6 Exclusive Interview can be deployed safely and much faster than ever before. If you give me 30 more seconds, I can tell you about Waabi’s second big differentiator. Please go ahead! The first one is the brain, our AI- first approach, and the second is our breakthrough simulator. If you look at the industry, to really understand whether the software works they need to drive many, many miles in the real world. This is why we see millions of miles driven by many, many teams. This is very expensive and not scalable. It’s also not the safest thing to do. Instead, what Waabi has is this breakthrough simulator where, with an unprecedented level of fidelity, we can test the entire software stack and remove the reliance of driving all those millions of miles in the real world. So, we can develop much safer and much faster. Is it a data augmentation thing? No, it’s much more than that. You can think of it as a digital world that is as big as the entire world and where everything looks real so that you can really test at scale – safety-critical scenarios as well as regular scenarios. You test close loop, which means that you test the reactions of the vehicle and how everything reacts to the vehicle as the vehicle does the manoeuvres. What is key to the simulator is that we can simulate how the sensors in real time will observe the scene in a way that looks the same as the real world. Mathematically, we can correlate if what happens in the digital world is the same thing that will happen in the real world. Who will your clients be? I guess the question is, what is the use case that Waabi is going to tackle? Because self-driving technology can be applied to many use cases. We believe that the first place this technology will be deployed is on self-driving trucks, so long-haul trucks. There are two reasons for this. One is that there is a chronic shortage of drivers. At the same time, it’s one of the most dangerous professions in North America, so there is a need for improved safety. From the point of view of the technology, if you think of robotaxis in our cities versus