Together Changing

Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov explains the benefits of lidar, radar, and cameras for self driving: "They're very complementary." "The frequencies are very different. Laser gives you very high resolution. Think of it as a laser beam that goes out, spins around, and shoots out millions of these laser pulses per second. Then each one comes back and you can sample the 3D structure of the world with very high resolution." "Radar has much lower resolution, but because of the physics of it, it degrades much better in adverse weather conditions. So—fog, snow, heavy rain." "If it's a nice, bright, sunny day, cameras are very valuable. If it's pitch dark, or you have the sun in your face, or you're blinded by the headlights from an oncoming car, then the camera will degrade." "It's a combination of the sensors. Each one is noisy. How the noise characteristics show up in different environments is different, but it's not like we switch from one to another." "They all go into the system that gives you, jointly, the best view of what's happening in the world." @dmitri_dolgov with @collision

I’m excited to announce a partnership with @Uber. As part of this, Uber plans to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian and deploy up to 50,000 R2 robotaxis. This partnership accelerates our path to Level 4 autonomy and supports our goal of building one of the safest autonomous platforms in the world—across both shared and personally owned vehicles. The combination of Rivian’s rapidly growing data flywheel, our in-house RAP1 inference platform (800 TOPS), and our multi-modal perception stack provides a powerful foundation to scale autonomy quickly and responsibly over the next couple of years.