- Alphabet’s driverless vehicle subsidiary Waymo recently announced it has acquired Latent Logic. These are the details about the deal.
Alphabet’s driverless vehicle subsidiary Waymo recently announced that it has acquired Latent Logic — which is a startup that spun out of Oxford University. The terms of the deal were undisclosed. Going forward, Latent Logic will continue to operate out of Oxford as Waymo’s first European engineering hub.
Currently, Waymo runs 10,000 virtual vehicles and it tests various scenarios. And Waymo vehicles have logged over 10 billion simulated miles so far and the acquisition of Latent Logic will bring a new imitation learning environment to simulate human behavior to the company’s technology.
Launched in 2017, Latent Logic was founded by professor Shimon Whiteson and head of the Whiteson Research Lab (WhiRL) machine learning research group within the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University in the UK.
In reinforcement learning environments, engineers flag good behavior so that the system knows how to behave whenever it encounters similar behaviors. However, real-world scenarios can be tricky sometimes. And reinforcement learning maximizes rewards instead of helping machines learn to behave more like humans during complex environments.
Latent Logic collects data from traffic cam videos. And Latent Logic analyzes the data for setting up policies that are able to simulate human behavior.
At an event in Detroit a few months ago, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said that robot ride-hailing may not be the first autonomous vehicle technology to take off commercially. Waymo is already testing rider only robo-taxis in Chandler, Arizona. Krafcik suggested that driverless delivery trucks that travel in easily repeatable routes could become mainstream faster.
“Where uses are strictly commercial and where we have very high confidence of delivering the outcomes that our commercial business partners would desire, we could have a much quicker ramp,” said Krafcik at the event via Bloomberg. “So it could be that although we’re starting with ‘robotaxis’ that a truck product could catch on faster.”
Waymo is also building a self-driving system for trucks. But its robot-taxi service has been seeing more attention following a decade of research at Alphabet’s Google. Krafcik acknowledged at the event that it is unknown when everything will be ready.
“I do share your sense of uncertainty, even in my role. I don’t know precisely when everything is going to be ready, but I know I am supremely confident that it will be,” added Krafcik at the event.
