Announcing the 2021 Autonomous Vehicle Summit Breakouts

We’re excited to see everyone virtually on June 9 at our 5th annual Autonomous Vehicles Summit, focused on the latest developments in the field. An important part of the Summit is the breakout session: your opportunity to hear from key principals in the industry and to ask them all your burning questions. This year, you’ll be able to join the virtual stage and questions via video.

There will be two sets of breakouts, with two sessions happening at once.

First set of breakouts:

TRUCK OUT: ‘PURE PLAY’ VS. ‘BOIL THE OCEAN’

Michael Fleming, Co-Founder & CEO, Torc Robotics

Martin Daum, Chief Executive, Daimler Truck AG

Moderated by Amir Efrati, Executive Editor, The Information

A split is forming among self-driving truck developers. Some want to install automated driving software on vehicles made by multiple manufacturers and plan to handle all aspects of an automated freight business, including operating shipping hubs and maintaining the trucks. Others including Daimler Trucks’ Torc are using a narrower approach in the effort to commercialize the software faster. Torc CEO Michael Fleming and Daimler Truck AG Chief Executive Martin Daum will discuss the diverging paths of major developers and what will happen next.

PROVING THE ROBOTS ARE SAFE

Mohammad Musa, Founder & CEO, Deepen AI

Laura Major, CTO, Motional

Nancy Sun, Head of Systems & Safety, Nuro

Moderated by Cory Weinberg, Reporter, The Information

Developers of AVs have struggled to show, both publicly and privately, that their prototypes are reliable. Principals from robotaxi developer Motional, delivery robot maker Nuro, and software tool developer Deepen discuss how the industry’s safety benchmarks are evolving, how companies are improving their vehicles and plan to prove to regulators and customers that they can be trusted. Should AV developers collaborate and agree on a safety standard or should they go it alone and try to turn safety into a competitive advantage, as Waymo's former CEO previously implied?

Second set of breakouts:

SAFETY NET

Nat Beuse, VP of Safety, Aurora

Moderated by Jessica Lessin, Founder & CEO, The Information

Nat Beuse spent nearly two decades as an executive at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before moving to Uber’s self-driving car unit. Now at Aurora following its acquisition of the Uber unit, Beuse will discuss how to develop a culture of safety among AV engineers; the most effective ways to work and build trust with transportation regulators as more prototypes enter the real world; and how to bring rival companies together to agree on a common safety standard for AVs.

BOEING IT RIGHT

Luis Dussan, Founder & CTO, AEye

Çetin Meriçli, Co-founder & CEO, Locomation

Moderated by Amir Efrati, Executive Editor, The Information

Defense contractors have been developing automated, must-not-fail systems for generations. Although some former military machine makers have found their way to the self-driving car field, AV developers still debate whether to follow their lead. Çetin Meriçli, co-founder and CEO of Locomation, a truck platooning developer who previously build autonomous machines for the Defense Department, and Luis Dussan, co-founder and CTO of lidar developer AEye (and a former longtime engineering lead at Lockheed Martin and Chief Technologist at Northrop Grumman Laser Systems), talk about how the debates led to differences in the way AV developers rely on deep neural networks and internationally recognized automotive standards to how they set up software simulators and assess the safety risks of their software.