Uber details VerCD, the AI tech powering its self-driving cars

Uber, which hasn't publicly discussed the architecture of its autonomous car platform in great detail, today published a post laying out the technologies that enable engineers within its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to test, validate, and deploy AI models to cars. It gives a glimpse into the complexities of self-driving car development generally, and perhaps more importantly, it serves as a yardstick for Uber's driverless efforts, which suffered a setback following an accident in Tempe, Arizona in May 2018. According to Uber, the most important component of the ATG's workflow is VerCD, a set of tools and microservices developed specifically for prototyping self-driving vehicles. It tracks the dependencies among the various codebases, data sets, and AI models under development, ensuring that workflows start with a data set extraction stage followed by data validation, model training, model evaluation, and model serving stages. "VerCD … has become a reliable source of truth for self-driving sensor training data for Uber ATG," wrote Uber.