Uber announces launch of AV Labs team

Uber (UBER) announced: “For more than a decade, Uber has worked to make transportation more accessible, reliable, and safe around the world. Autonomous vehicles are an important part of that future – not as a winner-take-all product, but as a way to make the benefits of autonomy easier to access for more people, faster. That’s why we’re launching AV Labs, a new team at Uber focused on accelerating the autonomy ecosystem by unlocking the hardest problem in the field today: a data flywheel that covers real-world, long-tail driving scenarios. As machine learning technology advances, autonomy is increasingly a data and modeling race. Progress no longer hinges on closed-course testing or simulated environments alone: it depends on learning from rare, messy, real-world scenarios that only appear at scale. These edge cases are difficult and expensive to capture, and they remain a major bottleneck to deploying safe, reliable autonomy, at scale, in a reliable and sustainable way… The next chapter of autonomy requires a lean, high-velocity, multidisciplinary team. AV Labs brings together experts across data, machine learning, computer vision, systems, and infrastructure to turn real-world operations into high-quality data that helps autonomous systems learn faster and perform better. The team is set to support our AV partners and accelerate progress across the ecosystem by building the core capabilities that power autonomy learning-from data mining and simulation to validation and system-level improvements across perception, prediction, and planning. Together they’ll harness Uber’s scale and real-world complexity to accelerate the future of transportation. AV Labs is actively hiring engineers and researchers who want to work close to the learning core of autonomy and help shape what comes next.”