Nuro honed its self-driving tech during a pilot programme that saw it develop autonomous delivery vehicles for Domino’s and grocery and pharmacy chain Kroger over 2021 and 2022 in Houston.
But it has now supplied the self-driving smarts for Lucid’s prototype robotaxi, being tested on closed roads in Las Vegas in collaboration with Uber.
In a company video, Ferguson says Nuro took a stock-standard Lucid Gravity EV, then added its self-driving hardware and software in just five weeks.
His firm plans to provide its autonomous driving technology to multiple car makers.
From Otago Law to Silicon Valley
Ferguson never set out to be the next Elon Musk.
He arrived at Otago University in 1997 with plans to complete an LLB, he told the Herald during a visit to Auckland in September 2022, during a post-lockdown visit to accept a Kea World Class Award
Said snowballing led to a PhD in Robotics and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. “It was like a Disney World of robotics, it was and still is, and I just was totally hooked,” Ferguson says.
“I participated in a bunch of different robot applications, including a big competition called the Darpa Urban Challenge, where we had robots racing each other in a mock urban environment. And from that point, I really became very, very excited about self-driving vehicles in particular.”
(Darpa is the US Government’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which supports R&D across a broad spectrum of startups. It provided key funding during Rocket Lab’s early stages.)
Ferguson went on to join Google’s self-driving car project – today known as Waymo – as a principal engineer and machine-learning lead before leaving in 2016 to co-found Nuro with Zhu (also a principal engineer on Google’s driverless car project).
The pair’s first-generation driverless car was a modified Prius. Now, with their third-gen model, they designed their own vehicle from scratch.
“We use both short and long-range cameras – similar to the eyes we have – and lidar [laser imaging, detection and ranging] to shoot lasers and create a 3D point cloud of the whole environment. We also use radar to get distance and velocity measurements for other vehicles,” Ferguson told the Herald in 2022.
Thermal cameras are also in the mix, used to detect the heat signature of people and animals – particularly at night.
“And we also have microphones for emergency vehicles or siren detection,” Ferguson says.
The plethora of complementary sensors adds up to a system that can maintain a detailed virtual map of the Nuro-controlled vehicle’s world at all times. The fully-automated technology saw the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration grant Nuro a special exemption from the usual requirement for side mirrors.
Ferguson is one of several ex-pat Kiwis who’ve made a splash on the international AI scene.
Others include Paul Copplestone, whose US-based start-up Supabase – whose technology hels with “vibe coding” recently raised US$200m, Nic Lane, whose UK-based start-up Flower helps AI makers train their software, and Alex Kendall, cofounder of another self-driving tech firm, UK-based Wayve, which last year raised US$1.05b in a round backed by Microsoft and Nvidia.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
