When trucks drive themselves with Chris Urmson of Aurora

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. So when you think about self-driving vehicles, you might imagine something like a robotaxi, you know, a car that can take you to work or school or home from a bar or a restaurant. In fact, if you live in San Francisco or Phoenix or a few other test markets, you can actually get a ride in a driverless car from a company like Waymo or Cruz. In fact, I've actually ridden in one myself, and they're actually pretty amazing. But there is a whole other industry that will be affected by autonomous vehicles as well, and that's trucking. And it's a huge part of the economy. According to the American Trucking Association, there are about three and a half million truck drivers in the US.

But even with that many workers, there is still a huge shortage of truck drivers in this country. And that's a problem that Chris Earmson believes could be solved by autonomous vehicles. Chris's company, Aurora, is building an autonomous driving system that can operate everything from large semi-trucks to passenger cars. Chris has actually been working on autonomous vehicles for his entire professional career. He was a founding member of Google's self-driving car program, which is now Waymo. And it all started as an early fascination with science. And robots. You know, as a kid I was

Kind of. Mesmerized by the space program and the shuttle launches and Yeah, enjoyed a lot of science fiction and thought robots were neat and built some out of Lego and then As I was finishing up my computer engineering degree, I saw this poster

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