Hardware Podcasts

Episode 136: Making driverless vehicles smarter - Shimon Whiteson

Robot Talk · 5 Dec 2025 · 33m · Episode 136

What this episode covers

Shimon Whiteson, a Professor at the University of Oxford and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Waymo, explains how deep reinforcement learning and imitation learning are used to make driverless vehicles smarter. He details the acquisition of his spinout company, Latent Logic, by Waymo in 2019 to improve simulation realism by modeling human road users. Whiteson discusses Waymo's multimodal sensor architecture (cameras, lidar, radar), the importance of data curation for rare safety-related conflicts, and the company's patient, capital-intensive strategy that has led to its commercial robotaxi leadership.

Most relevant to

large enterprises

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Waymo, Latent Logic, Google X, Uber, Lyft
Also
lidar, cameras, radar

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