What Is A Typical Day Like Working On Self-Driving Cars?

What is a typical day like working on a self driving car as a full-time job? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. I work as a research scientist on autonomous vehicles, researching problems related to 3D object localization and SLAM. Apart from research, I am also responsible for creating production quality code that our product team can test and integrate. Most of my typical day looks like any other software engineer or data scientist's work day: hacking code, analyzing results on pre-recorded datasets, talking to colleagues about the code we have committed. For instance, two problems I am working on these days are getting precise and smooth (that don't vary a lot from frame to frame) orientation estimates for other cars on the road as seen from a passive camera, and on trying to squeeze our entire software stack on limited mobile computational platforms.