Wayve claims that his autonomous car was the first to make a trip using only the AI ​​and a GPS navigator

Until now, to travel by road, autonomous vehicles were needed. costly sensors and radars, in addition to a large amount of data: High-resolution maps of the area to be scanned, rules for information and manual coding, some specific to this route, etc.

That was, at least, betting big companies like Google / Waymo or Uber. A gamble but expensive and not very flexible (it ceases to be useful as soon as conditions are no longer mastered) and that, after all, many believe that it has not allowed to take giant steps to consolidate the presence of autonomous cars in the streets of cities.

Wayve, the newcomer who taught Waymo a lesson

But here, in 2017, a small startup called Wayve appeared in the UK with a revolutionary proposal: it would be able to design a car capable of to travel to places that had not traveled before and that did not have specific information.

It would be enough to have a software platform equipped with machine learning, a few cameras and a GPS navigator of all life to start walking the country roads. The problem with Wayve in 2017 was that they had no proof that they were able to achieve it.

Now they have reached it, driving his car in the streets of Cambridge (UK) so far unknown for the vehicle … and they downloaded it on Youtube:

Alex Kendall, co-founder of Wayve, explains that their cars "they learn alone to drive from data with automatic learning. Whenever a safety driver intervenes and takes over, the car learns to drive better. "

Kendall says that they do not offer to tell the car how to drive: "the vehicle learns to drive through the experience, the example and the feedback from experience, as a human being," which in his opinion is "safer and more scalable than any other current approach ".

"The model used is based on the automatic learning of steering responses, braking and acceleration of the vehicle.

In this way, the calculation of the data provided is very efficient, does not require a large calculation power and consumes much less energy than the other platforms.

[Además] it uses computers and sensors whose cost is less than 10% compared to those of its competitors. "

Wayve's plans now go through launch a first wave of vehicles in 100 different cities (with whom they intend to perfect their technology), as well as to launch a collaboration with Jaguar to presents its autonomous platform in the Jaguar I-PACE.