Hear from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo about the two roads to autonomous driving at TC Sessions: Mobility – TechCrunch

The road to commercializing autonomous vehicle technology for people has split into two paths.

In one camp, AV developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Waymo and Zoox are aiming straight for full autonomy — a system that can handle all driving within certain conditions and with no expectation for a human to take over. In other words, the passenger can fall asleep or play on their phone.

Then there are some automakers, notably Tesla, that are taking an it-will-improve-over-time approach to autonomy. In these cases, an advanced driver-assistance system may offer limited autonomous features with the plan that over time a greater level of autonomy may be achieved.

Billions of dollars have been invested in these varying paths — each one with its own set of true believers. And in the middle sits Nvidia, the chipmaking giant that develops and supplies automakers and AV developers with the tools they need to deploy autonomous technology.

We’re excited to announce that three experts from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo who are working on AV technology will join us onstage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 to help dissect the challenges and opportunities of each approach and weigh in on which might deliver first at scale.

Our speakers are Yanbing Li, senior VP of engineering at Aurora; Saswat Panigrahi, vice president of strategy, product management and data science at Waymo; and Sarah Tariq, the VP of autonomous driving software at Nvidia.

Li, Panigrahi and Tariq bring decades of experience to the field.

Li leads all software development for Aurora, including autonomy, ground truth, mapping, simulation, cloud infrastructure and data platform. Prior to Aurora, she was a VP of product and engineering at Google and led the Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) organization in Google Cloud.

She also led product development, engineering and go-to-market strategy at VMware and worked for Synopsys in various research, development and engineering leadership roles. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, a master’s degree from Cornell University and a BS from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in electrical engineering and computer engineering.

Panigrahi, who joined Waymo in 2016, manages the engineering and commercial roadmaps across its business lines of ride hailing, long-haul trucking and local delivery. Before Waymo, he was the senior product manager at Google, working on Google Chrome, Chromebooks and Android.

Prior to Google, he held roles of software developer, product manager and line manager at Ericsson in Canada, China and Sweden. He also worked as a research engineer at McGill University. Panigrahi earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, his master’s in electrical and computer engineering at McGill University in Canada and his master’s in business administration from IMD in Switzerland.

Tariq helps lead Nvidia’s efforts in creating and developing its AV platform called Nvidia Drive. Her team is responsible for providing some of the core software pieces of this platform, including the perception, localization, mapping, prediction and planning and control stacks.

Before joining Nvidia, Tariq spent six years at Zoox, where she worked on the perception stack, leading the vision and perception teams. Prior to this, she spent a decade working in several areas, including real-time simulation and rendering, performance optimization for high-performance computing and supercomputers and computer vision.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them. Register today before prices increase May15!