GRASP Industry Talk: Zoox - January 25th, 2021

About Zoox:
Zoox will provide mobility-as-a-service in dense urban environments. We will handle the driving, charging, maintenance, and upgrades for our fleet of vehicles. The rider will simply pay for the service.
In 2020, Zoox joined forces with Amazon. And in the process, solidified our future in the autonomous vehicle industry. We are focused on testing on private and public roads as we move towards launching the first Zoox ride-hailing service.

Perception, Prediction, and Planning & Controls in Autonomous Driving:

In this presentation we will talk about Zoox’s core principles and vision and also dive a little deeper into the various challenges that we encounter in Perception, Prediction, and Planning & Controls. Autonomous Driving is one of today’s most exciting and impactful emerging technologies and we will share how Machine Learning plays a critical role in bringing this to market.

If you want to come prepared with challenging questions, you can get a preview of Zoox’s autonomy stack here, learn about our computer vision approach here, and see our vehicle reveal here (not a concept car….it actually drives!).

Speakers:
Sarah Tariq, Senior Director of Perception

Sarah earned her MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech where she worked on computer graphics and computer vision research. Sarah has been at Zoox for more than five years and prior to that she has almost a decade of experience working at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, among other things, she contributed to the implementation of several novel real-time simulation and rendering of algorithms, led a team working on profiling and optimizing code for high performance computing and super computers, and served as a technical lead for the computer vision team focusing on self-driving technology.

Kai Wang, Director of Prediction

Kai Wang is the Director of Prediction at Zoox. At Zoox, the Prediction team is responsible for modeling the future behavior of all dynamic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.) around our vehicle so that we can navigate through the world in a safe and efficient manner. Kai has been at Zoox for five years and prior to that was a Software Engineer at Google working on Computer Vision. Kai received his PhD from UC San Diego and BS from the University of Washington, both in Computer Science.

Marin Kobilarov, Principal Software Engineer

Marin earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Marin has been at Zoox for over five years as a Principal Engineer in our Planning & Controls group. He is also an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University where he leads the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems, Control, and Optimization. His research group focuses on dynamics and control of mechanical systems, on approximation methods for optimization and motion planning, and on the development of robotic embedded systems.