Cetin Mericli, Co-Founder and CEO, Locomotion
This year is going to be very energetic and very high-paced. That alone gives me goosebumps intimidates me and energizes me at the same time. When we are done with the autonomy stack, when we know the truck can steer itself, where does it go how does it operate, hour by hour? What is a day in the life of an autonomous truck?
Figuring out all of these processes and that’s going to keep us very busy. Further autonomous driving. In general, is an incredibly difficult problem and solo driverless operation requires almost human level if not exceeding human-level cognitive capabilities. And in artificial intelligence terms that is called artificial general intelligence. We decided to start with what we dubbed a human-guided autonomy convoy system where there’s a driver active engaged driver in the front track and there is no active driver in the follower track but the concept was human-guided autonomy. The biggest difference of locomation compared to other av companies is the way we are looking to the problem, we are looking for how we can design a system that can be understandable by humans, and also that system can understand human actions. To let them actually interact together intuitively. One of the reasons for keeping the human in the loop for human-guided autonomy is actually safer right now. The state of the technology development for autonomy doesn’t allow the most complicated situations to be adequately addressed by robots and human beings can exercise judgment as well as anticipate issues up ahead and be able to safely react to situations in a way that right now it’s very challenging for autonomous technologies to do.
I know what a really good culture is and I want to help build that so I really made a commitment to locomation to find not just the technical knowledgeable hires that we were going to bring in but people that were actually going to fit with our culture you know love coming to work every day being passionate about what we’re doing here has been top of my mind and I know it’s been top of the founders’ minds.
It is the right time for the right technology to come and have a huge impact on the global stage so whether you come from the robotics spectrum or whether you come from trucking or whether you come from a global supply chain you’ll find a rich home here at Locomation. We are working on a very very difficult problem but we are actually approaching that problem with a different set of lenses, essentially formulating it as a product rather than an open-ended. problem so we know when we will be there and that is what excites me automated driving technology is finally going to be a product and we will achieve that
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