Apple has shown a little more of what it’s getting done in the self-driving tech world. This week Ruslan Salakhutidinov, the company’s director of artificial intelligence (AI), made a presentation in California that highlighted several of the company’s machine learning advances.
The presentation, made on Friday during the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, included showcasing technology that identifies and classifies objects including pedestrians and other vehicles, from 3D point cloud information.
Salakhutidinov also revealed a method to track a vehicle’s position precisely, known as SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping). His work all-but confirms Apple’s entry into the self-driving vehicle industry, one of tech’s most hotly contested arms races. CEO Tim Cook recently told Bloomberg that “autonomous systems” were the “mother of all AI projects.”
Apple is not expected to make its own cars. However the firm is committed to creating automated employee shuttle called PAIL, or Palo Alto to Infinite Loop. The iPhone maker’s technology will be bolted onto another company’s vehicle: an earlier sighting showed a fitted-out Lexus equipped with RADAR and LiDAR units from Silicon Valley-based company Velodyne.