Sharp-eyed St. Louisans may have noticed this past weekend a white sedan with a round camera perched atop its hood cruising the city streets. Printed on its door were the words: “Autonomy for all. All roads. All rides.”
Fully autonomous taxis à la Waymo are not in St. Louis. Yet. The white sedan belongs to Nuro, a Mountain View, California-based company that is working on what it calls a “scalable, generalizable autonomy stack”—in other words, technology that the company hopes can be applied to everything from delivery vans to robotaxis to personal cars, making them autonomous.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
Their vehicle was in St. Louis as part of the company’s national data collection tour, which involves gathering data on roads from compact, complex city environments to better train its AI for real life driving conditions. As the car cruised through town, its cameras, lidar and radar captured everything happening around it on the road.
A Nuro spokeswoman says the tour included stops in 40 cities. While the she didn’t say that St. Louis was an ideal training ground, she may as well have. She indicates that the company was seeking out “adverse weather conditions” (check) and “unpredictable intersections” (check, check). The car made multiple passes through the same areas in order to “deepen learning in the most challenging conditions.”
“By gathering this kind of real-world data from a wide range of cities and environments, we’re giving our AI the information it needs to learn, adapt and improve,” the spokeswoman said. “Because we’re building a system designed to work in many places—not just one neighborhood or vehicle model—we need this broad, diverse data to help our autonomy stack generalize.”
In addition to bizarre intersections and Autobahn-style roads adjacent to residential neighborhoods, we can only assume that the often erratic and occasionally maniacal drivers of St. Louis put Nuro’s tech through its paces as well.
And for the record: No, the Nuro car was not driving itself. Maybe next time.
Hear more about Nuro from Krull on The 314 Podcast.
