The Future of Autonomy and Scaling Applied Intuition

Peter Ludwig, Co-Founder & CTO, Applied Intuition and Yaser Khalighi, Product, Applied Intuition joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss the acquisition of SceneBox and why everything that moves will be autonomous in the future. 

The conversation begins with Yaser discussing why he made the decision to sell SceneBox to Applied Intuition in March 2023.

The vision of building SceneBox, my vision was enabling customers in their autonomy journey. The reason that we exited to Applied was exactly to double down on that vision. – Yaser Khaligh

Applied is in the process of integrating SceneBox into their product offering, while retaining the user-friendliness of the SceneBox platform. 

The ultimate goal is that it’s a completely seamless experience in what we call the ADP (Applied Development Platform). – Peter Ludwig

The integrated SceneBox / Applied product offering will help autonomous vehicles and autonomous trucks scale safely and quickly. To further enhance the Applied product, Applied acquired Embark Trucks for $71 million in August 2023. Prior to the acquisition, Embark was a long-time Applied customer. 

With the acquisition we are discontinuing the autonomy trucking program, we are not entering Level 4 trucking. But we are going to be able to repurpose the tools they had built around the Applied development platform, and in fact bring some of those into our platform were it makes sense. – Peter Ludwig

The data that Applied acquired from Embark will help their customers accelerate the development of their autonomous driving stack for Class-8 trucks. When it comes to training a virtual driver, unique data sets are needed to train the driver. Data gathered for Class-8 trucks can not necessarily be translated over to a developing a virtual driver for robotaxi operations.

Taking a step out of the virtual world, Applied is has a partnership with NI (National Instruments) for hardware-in-the-loop validation. This partnership will allow their customers to scale quickly and safely and puts Applied ahead if and when certifications for autonomous driving systems become required by regulatory bodies. 

Wrapping up the conversation, Peter and Yaser share their opinions on the future of autonomy.

Chapters:

0:00 The Road to Autonomy Index

0:56 Introduction

1:38 Applied Intuition acquires SceneBox

17:27 Peter Ludwig — Why Applied Intuition acquired Embark Trucks

21:16 ML (Machine Learning) Models for Autonomous Driving

34:02 Applied’s Synthetic Datasets (How they are Developed)

43:00 What is the Future of Autonomy?

Recorded on Tuesday, August 15, 2023

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