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VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads
A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector.
Founders of each startup believe they’ve cracked the code to one of the more challenging applications of automated driving by building software that doesn’t rely on some of the main crutches of testing and deployment — such as detailed maps, large swaths of training data and the ability to fall back on remote assistance. Overland, which is stacked with deep tech veterans from Google, Nvidia, Apple, Waymo, Aurora, Embark and Argo as well as software engineers who’ve worked on mission-critical solutions at SpaceX, RTX and the U.S. Army, was recently selected to continue on to the second phase. To pull the person out means vehicles must autonomously navigate complex off-road terrain using only onboard sensors (mainly cameras, according to Boots) and compute, without relying on maps, GPS or remote human operators.
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