Dr. Steven Waslander: Canada Takes a Big Strike in the Driver-less Future | Le Canada mise gros sur l’avenir sans conducteur

Dr. Steven Waslander, University of Waterloo

Thursday, February 15, 2018

With worldwide R&D investment exceeding tens of billions of dollars, self-driving vehicles are fast approaching. Yet it is still unclear how these vehicles will handle truly Canadian weather. Dr. Waslander will present recent work at the University of Waterloo to create Canada’s first university-led, all-weather, self-driving vehicle. He will also share his perspectives on the state of the autonomous driving industry, the forward-looking legislation that has enabled large scale research testing and the vibrant ecosystem now growing up around this technology in Canada. Building on its strong position in artificial intelligence, Canada can now play a unique role in bringing self-driving vehicles to the public.

Prof. Steven Waslander is a leading authority on autonomous aerial and ground vehicles, and in localization and 3-D object detection in multi-vehicle systems. An Associate Professor of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, at the University of Waterloo, he received his B.Sc.E. from Queen’s University, and his masters and doctorate from Stanford University in Aeronautics and Astronautics, where as a graduate student he created the Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC), the world’s most capable outdoor multi-vehicle quadrotor platform at the time. He was recruited to Waterloo in 2008, where he founded and he still directs the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (WAVELab).