“It brings accountability to the industry,” says Raquel Urtesun, Waabi’s firebrand founder and CEO (who is also a professor at the University of Toronto): “There are no more excuses.”
After quitting Uber, where she led the ride-sharing firm’s driverless car division, Urtesun founded Waabi in 2021 with a different vision for how autonomous vehicles should be made. The firm, which has partnerships with Uber Freight and Volvo, has been running real trucks on real roads in Texas since 2023, but it carries out the majority of its development inside a simulation called Waabi World. Waabi is now taking its sim-first approach to the next level, not only using Waabi World to train and test its driving models but to prove their real-world safety.
For now, Waabi’s trucks drive with a human in the cab. But it plans to go human-free later this year. To do that, it needs to demonstrate the safety of its system to regulators. “These trucks are 80,000 lbs,” says Urtesun. “They’re really massive robots.”
Urtesun argues that it is impossible to prove the safety of Waabi’s trucks just by driving on real roads. Unlike robotaxis, which often operate on busy streets, many of Waabi’s trucks drive for hundreds of miles on straight highways. That means you won’t encounter enough dangerous situations by chance to vet the system fully, Urtesun says.
But before using Waabi World to prove the safety of its real-world trucks, Waabi first has to prove that the behavior of its trucks inside the simulation matches the behavior of its trucks in the real world under the exact same conditions.
Virtual reality
Inside Waabi World, the same driving model that controls Waabi’s real trucks gets hooked up to a virtual truck. Waabi World then feeds that model with simulated video, radar and lidar inputs that mimic the inputs that real trucks receive. The simulation can recreate a wide range of weather and lighting conditions. “We have pedestrians, animals, all that stuff,” says Urstesan. “Objects that are rare, you know, like a mattress that’s flying off the back of another truck, whatever.”
Waabi World also simulates the properties of the truck itself, such as its momentum and acceleration, and its different gear shifts. It also simulates the truck’s onboard computer, including the microsecond time-lags between receiving and processing inputs from different sensors in different conditions. “The time it takes to process the information and then come up with an outcome has a lot of impact on how safe your system is,” says Urtesun.
To show that Waabi World’s simulation is accurate enough to capture the exact behavior of a real truck, Waabi then ran Waabi World as a kind of digital twin of the real world and measured how much they diverged.
