Self-driving cars have been dreamt of since GM presented an early vision of it at 1956’s GM expo. The technologies related to self-driving car development including AI have been evolving almost independently in their swim lanes. Among many other events, three DARPA sponsored, robot-car races between 2004 and 2007 offered a unique opportunity for technological showcase: Robotics and AI demonstrated the possibility of autonomous driving in the near future, and reignited the pursuit of realizing self-driving car in daily life. Since 2007, the advancement of AI and the related technologies has been encouraging many industrial and academic organizations to jump into the bandwagon, and helping them devote a tremendous amount of efforts to the realization of this dream. In this talk, I’d like to share my opinions on how AI enables cars to drive by themselves, and, from the perspective of delivering everyday autonomous driving, where we stand and what challenges we need to address.

Youngwoo Seo is the CEO of Atlas Robotics, Inc., where a team of enthusiastic field-roboticists is pushing the limits to deliver a practical, reliable, and scalable autonomous transportation. Prior to this, Dr. Seo headed a team of engineers for developing perception stacks and mission-critical systems for the Hyperloop One, led the development of autonomous flight software for Autel Robotics’ next-generation drone, led a team of engineers to deliver a part of the nextgeneration products at Apple, and was a technical consultant for Cruise Automation (acquired by GM). Dr. Seo holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Robotics, a Masters of Science in Robotics from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters of Computer Science from Seoul National University, and a Bachelors of Computer Science from Konkuk University.