HIBT Lab! Nuro: Dave Ferguson

Welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So over the past several years, there has been a lot of progress and also a lot of hype around self-driving cars. There's several companies like Tesla and Waymo and Cruz all working to get more autonomous vehicles on the roads. And for most of these companies, the focus has been removing the driver from the car, which would allow passengers to relax without having to drive themselves. What if you remove the passengers from self-driving cars as well? Well, that's the approach that our guest today is taking. His name is Dave Ferguson and he's the co-founder of NURO.

It's a company that makes fully autonomous vehicles that are made to carry goods. Not people. And Dave imagines a world where many of our everyday errands, like Grocery shopping or food takeout or package deliveries could be performed by these cars. Already, the company's zero occupant self-driving vehicles have been on the roads in Silicon Valley and in Houston, making deliveries with big name partners like Domino's and Kroger grocery stores.

Dave grew up in New Zealand, where he developed an interest in robotics during his time as an undergraduate at the University of Otago. This robot was this beautiful little red rubbish bin or trash can. It looked it looked like a little mini Dalek from Doctor Who, but but bright red. And and our task was to try to get it to map indoor environments. And so this was the first time that I'd ever interacted with a robot. Um I was totally hooked. It was like a roomba, it would just like move around the room and map it? Yeah, it was like a roomba, but about um a yard tall.

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