Shift Magazine - July 22, 2019 - 10

FUTURE SELF
AVs have traveled far in 10 years. But caution: Speed bumps ahead
BY MARCUS AMICK

T

he auto industry is in the midst of a defining era as it works
vigorously to safely increase the number of self-driving
vehicles on public roads.
Waymo, which operates 600 self-driving vehicles in
the Phoenix area, is an indication of how far the technology has
evolved since 2009, when Google launched its self-driving car
program, and since 2004, when teams of eager college students, entrepreneurs and corporations put early autonomous
vehicles to the test in the first of three pivotal desert races
staged by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or DARPA.
And yet, as the industry looks to build on that progress, it
faces a number of challenges when it comes to creating a more
robust environment for self-driving vehicles.
At a Shift panel discussion in June at Waymo headquarters
in Mountain View, Calif., industry experts addressed the challenges that will impact the future of autonomous vehicles.

SIMPLIFYING THE TECH

One fundamental challenge is the complexity of the technology
needed to develop and operate the vehicles.
A fully autonomous car requires an endless number of hardware and software components and algorithms, all focused on
enabling an AV company such as Waymo to be able to see a

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self-driving vehicle's surroundings and understand what is happening around the car, before charting a vehicle's course from
point A to point B.
"If you think about it, a lot of the challenges we faced back then
are still the same problems that we are working on now," said
Mike Montemerlo, senior staff software engineer at Waymo.
Montemerlo, who was the software lead for the Stanford
team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, added, "It's
just that the level of complexity has increased dramatically."
Still, most in the industry tend to agree: The advancement of
self-driving vehicles will depend heavily on how well companies
continue to find innovative ways to seamlessly integrate complexities into the vehicles.

MORE EFFICIENT SENSORS

Finding new ways to improve the efficiency and capabilities of
lidar, radar and camera sensor technology will continue to be crucial to create a more robust environment for self-driving vehicles.
"When we kicked this [self-driving car] project off in 2009,
what we wanted to do is better understand the complexity of
the problem and understand what it would take for us to go from
a DARPA challenge type environment, that is very synthetic and
artificial, to real public roads and interacting with real people,"
said Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo chief technology officer. Like
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