On Thursday, Rajat Basu, chief engineer for the Origin program, validated those theories. At the time, Ammann mentioned Cruise's intention to manufacture custom silicon in-house to cut costs, but didn't admit outright using that silicon to build a chip - but TechCrunch had its theories. And with the right mix of synthetic and real data, we can increase relevant data in our data sets by an order of magnitude or more.' Two custom silicon chips developed in-houseĭuring GM's investor day in October, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann outlined the company's plan to invest heavily into the compute power of the Origin in order to decrease costs by 90% over the next four generations so it can scale profitably.

'In our experience targeted synthetic data is about 180 times faster than collecting road data, and millions of dollars cheaper. 'Emergency vehicles are rare compared to other types of vehicles, but we need to detect them with extremely high accuracy, so we use our data generation pipeline to create millions of simulation images of ambulances, fire trucks and police cars,' said Gandhi. Generating synthetic data helps the Cruise AV target specific use cases, said Gandhi, pointing specifically to identifying and interacting with emergency vehicles, presumably for no other reason than to take a dig at Tesla, whose Autopilot ADAS system has come under federal scrutiny for repeated crashes into emergency vehicles. It uses machine learning to automatically enter as many parameters as it wants to generate thousands of interesting and rare scenarios against which it tests the AV. Morpheus is a system that can generate simulations based on specific locations on the map. It's a super easy and extremely powerful way to build test suites that accelerate AV development.'įor specific scenarios that Cruise hasn't been able to collect in real-world road conditions, there's Morpheus.

'Once we have the simulation, we can actually create permutations of the event and change attributes like vehicle and pedestrian types. 'The Road to Sim combines information from perception with heuristics learned from our millions of real-world miles to recreate a full simulation environment from road data,' said Gandhi. This ensures that the AV doesn't regress by testing against scenarios it has already seen.

He then laid out the technology for the 'Road to Sim,' which transforms into editable simulation scenarios real events that have been collected by AVs on the road.

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