Competing With the Giants in Race to Build Self-Driving Cars

These algorithms can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data. "It used to be that a real smart Ph.D. sat in a cube for six months, and they would hand-code a detector" that spotted objects on the road, Mr. Urmson said during a recent interview at Aurora's offices. "Now, you gather the right kind of data and feed it to an algorithm, and a day later, you have something that works as well as that six months of work from the Ph.D." The Google self-driving car project first used the technique to detect pedestrians. Since then, it has applied the same method to many other parts of the car, including systems that predict what will happen on the road and plan a route forward. Now, the industry as a whole is moving in the same direction.