Cruise Simulation with Tom Boyd

Cruise is an autonomous car company with a development cycle that is highly dependent on testing its cars–both in the wild and in simulation. The testing cycle typically requires cars to drive around gathering data, and that data to subsequently be integrated into a simulated system called Matrix. With COVID-19, the ability to run tests in the wild has been severely dampened. Cruise cannot put so many cars on the road, and thus has had to shift much of its testing procedures to rely more heavily on the simulations. Therefore, the simulated environments must be made very accurate, including the autonomous agents such as pedestrians and cars. Tom Boyd is VP of Simulation at Cruise. He joins the show to talk about the testing workflow at Cruise, how the company builds simulation-based infrastructure, and his work managing simulation at the company.