Waabi says its virtual robotrucks are realistic enough to prove the real ones are safe

What is real and what is simulation! How and when can simulation replace real testing!

Fact is there is no 100% safety no matter how many times you test!

Let the virtual testing begin!

"The news: Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.

How it did it: The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotrucks, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin's performance compares to that of real trucks on real roads. Waabi says they now match almost exactly, and claims its approach is a better way to demonstrate safety than just racking up real-world miles, as many of its competitors do. ..."

"One of the biggest challenges in developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) is gathering enough high-quality data to test the system so that we can be confident that it can operate safely in the real world. Historically, this has involved extensive real-world driving to try to test if the vehicle can handle a wide range of complex interactions. Humans, typically triage engineers, then meticulously analyze the data to identify interesting events, such as interventions where the autonomous systems faltered, and use these instances to refine the system and improve its decision-making capabilities. The process is resource intensive, inefficient and insufficient as a solution.

The unpredictable nature of the real world means that, no matter how many miles an AV drives, it’s essentially impossible to guarantee exposure to every potential real-world situation, especially those safety-critical, low-frequency events. Life threatening accidents happen roughly once for every 10 million miles that are driven by humans, a fatality is roughly once every 100 million miles. Considering that a human-driven truck, at best, covers 100,000 miles annually, it would take a fleet of 1,000 trucks an entire year to potentially encounter just one such event. Recreating dangerous scenarios for testing purposes is not an alternative and is also ethically problematic and often practically impossible. ..."

Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test.

Waabi says its virtual robotrucks are realistic enough to prove the real ones are safe "The startup says its super-realistic simulation is a better way to prove real-world safety—without the real-world miles."

Simulator Realism: The New Safety Standard for the AV Industry "Waabi World achieves unprecedented 99.7% realism score, setting the bar for the AV industry."

Researchers have attempted to assess simulator realism by analyzing the distribution of behaviors in simulation vs the real world, but it is an imperfect approach that cannot be used to understand if the simulator is realistic enough to assess the specific deficiencies of the system, or if it can be used for validation. In this illustrative graphic, the pink highlights the difference in the behavior distributions between a set of simulation and real world scenarios.

The CEO of Waabi is Raquel Urtasun, a well known ML & AI researcher. Over 89,000 citations according to Google Scholar.