Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners

Summary

Uber has more than 20 autonomous vehicle partners, and they all want one thing: data. So the company says it’s going to make that available through a new division called Uber AV Labs. Despite the name, Uber is not returning to developing its own robotaxis, which it stopped doing after one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian in 2018. (Uber ultimately sold off the division in 2020 in a complex deal with Aurora.) But it will send its own cars out into cities adorned with sensors to collect data for partners like Waymo, Waabi, Lucid Motors, and others — though no contracts are signed just yet. Broadly speaking, self-driving cars are in the middle of a shift away from rules-based operation and toward relying more on reinforcement learning. As that happens, real-world driving data has become hugely valuable for training these systems. Uber told TechCrunch the autonomous vehicle companies that want this data the most are the ones that have already been collecting a lot of it themselves. It’s a sign that, like many of the frontier AI labs, they’ve come to realize that “solving” the most extreme edge cases is a volume game. A physical limit Right now, the size of an autonomous vehicle company’s fleet creates a physical limit to how much data it can collect. And while many of these companies create simulations of real-world environments to hedge against edge cases, nothing beats driving on actual roads — and driving a lot — when it comes to discovering all the strange, difficult, and flat-out unexpected scenarios that cars wind up in. Waymo provides an example of this gap. The company has had autonomous vehicles in operation or in testing for a decade, and yet its current robotaxis have recently been caught illegally passing stopped school buses. Having access to a larger pool of driving data could help robotaxi companies solve some of those problems before or as they creep up, Uber’s chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch in an exclusive intervie...