Nuro Driver™ August Release Notes

The Nuro Driver™ is always improving in keeping with our core company value to be 1% better every day. Each month we track improvements with our latest software release. In August we had a number of exciting developments resulting in a smoother ride with better navigation. Read on for all of the details.

Exciting New Features & Machine Learned Models

• Faster Driving: Activated driving at speeds up to 35 mph and improved our driving performance to act 36% more like an expert driver.
• Better Predictions: Rolled out a new prediction model that significantly improved predictions for vehicles by 16%, cyclists by 19%, and pedestrians by 13%. Greatly improved predictions for vehicles coming out of driveways.
• Improved Traffic Signal Detection: Enhanced our ability to detect traffic signals with a new end-to end traffic signals classifier and a newly deployed perception model.
• Interface Redesign: Upgraded our testing fleet tablet interface with improved audio commenting.

1% Better Every Day

• Vehicle Controls Improvements: Delivered a smoother drive with 25% less jerky throttle/brake, enhanced acceleration/deceleration, and 90% fewer jerky steering motions.
• Better Agent Interactions: Improved navigation around pedestrian & unprotected stop interactions. More assertiveness for narrow oncoming interaction and better behavior around occlusions and on road pedestrians and cyclists leading to fewer brake jabs.
• Perception Improvements: High coverage labels provided by the data mining and labeling pipelines yielded performance improvements across key perception metrics.
• Recall Improvements: 11% on Pedestrians, 8% on Vehicles, 5% on Cyclists, 4% on Animals, 4% on Motorcyclists
• Improvements in False Positive Rates: 71% Motorcyclists, 26% Vehicles, 24% Cyclists, 19% Animals
• Up-To-Date and Faster Technology Updates: Sped up our bot updates so every vehicle is always up-to-date with the latest tech.

Statistical information regarding percentage improvements is based on internal data.