The work "represents a major advance in autonomous robotics," says Dario Floreano, director of the Institute of Systems Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
At Lyft, Maddox will be the company's first senior director of autonomous safety and compliance.
"Hundreds of billions of miles of human driving data may be needed to develop safe and reliable autonomous vehicles," said Chris Ballinger, director of mobility services and chief financial officer at Toyota's research institute, in a statement.
"Ultimately, it is a more efficient and effective way to do maritime surveillance, we think, in large ocean areas," said Egan Greenstein, senior director of autonomous maritime systems at Boeing.
What is the use case for autonomous cars?" Ocado's technology director Paul Clarke defended the idea of autonomous cars, pointing to Google's original vision for the technology, which was to boost transport efficiency by getting vehicles travelling close together and in coordination.
As the director of an autonomous system for the past 10 years, running a robotic telescope in the Canary Islands with 160,000 users, I – along with my colleagues – faced the challenge of operating optimally and keeping the instruments safe whatever the weather; not quite life-threatening, but computationally demanding.
Delaunay was previously robotics program lead at Google, co-founder of autonomous vehicle startup Otto and director of engineering at Uber.
Olson was also a co-director focused on autonomous driving at Toyota Research Institute, which houses some of the top minds in the world in robotics, and is taking a leave from his current role as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan to build May.
Last month, Sebastian Thrun, director of Google's autonomous vehicle research program, wrote that the project had achieved 200,000 miles of driving without an accident while cars were under computer control.
Potential liabilities will be huge for the designers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles, said Gary E. Marchant, director of the Center for Law, Science and Innovation at the Arizona State University law school.
