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Zoox founders Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson say everyone else involved in the race to build a self-driving car is doing it wrong. Instead of retro-fitting existing cars with fancy sensors and smart software, they want to make an autonomous vehicle from the ground up.

The one they’ve built is all-electric. It’s bidirectional so it can cruise into a parking spot traveling one way and cruise out the other. It makes noises to communicate with pedestrians. It has screens on the windows to issue custom welcome messages to passengers. If the founders prove correct, it will be the safest vehicle on the road, having replaced decades of conventions built around drivers with a type of protective cocoon for riders. And, of course, Zoox wants to run its own ride-hailing service.

Both founders sound quite serious as they argue that Zoox is obvious, almost inevitable. The world will eventually move to perfectly engineered robotic vehicles, so why waste time trying to incorporate self-driving technology into yesteryear’s cars? “We are a startup pitted against the biggest companies on the planet,” Kentley-Klay says. “But we believe deeply that what we’re building is the right thing. Creativity and technical elegance will win here.”

While at Stanford, Levinson invented a new way to calibrate the sensors on self-driving cars. These types of vehicles typically rely on cameras and lasers to build a picture of the world around them. To fine-tune the imaging systems, engineers often hold up posters with checkerboard and target patterns as a baseline. In the field, though, the sensors can be difficult to reconfigure when out of whack. Levinson wrote software that made it possible to configure the sensors while driving, using objects in the real world to provide feedback instead of the test patterns. “The vehicle can figure out where its sensors are with superhuman levels of accuracy, down to 2 millimeters and 1/100th of a degree,” he says.

From those first days, Zoox and its founders had a clear picture of the vehicle they wanted. It would have an identical front and rear, and would be easy to service on the rare occasions when it wore out its built-in redundant parts. Each wheel would have its own motor, so the vehicle could make precise maneuvers in tight spaces and park just about anywhere. And its array of sensors and cameras would be seamlessly integrated, not jammed onto an existing vehicle.

Excerpted from an article on Zoox in Bloomberg Business Week dated 17-Jul-2018