LAS VEGAS, NV — The Torc Robotics self driving cars, dubbed Asimov, are cruising the streets of Las Vegas this week at CES, safely handling complex driving scenarios. In this video, the car handles a wrong-way driver at the same time pedestrians are in the road and another car overlaps the lane. Using Torc’s complete end-to-end software stack, the vehicle perceives the wrong-way driver moving towards it, plans how to act, then slows down to control the situation and increase safety.

“It’s possible the greatest challenge in the self-driving space is safely handling the infinite corner case scenarios,” says Torc CEO Michael Fleming. “If we polled 100 people on what a human driver should do in this scenario, you would get a lot of different answers,” he explains.

“We have collected petabytes of these scenarios over the last decade — all the way back to the DARPA Urban Challenge.” Torc is working with private and government entities to share these lessons learned and develop safety criteria so self driving cars can lead to safer transportation for all.

Torc is offering CES visitors private rides in Las Vegas in the start of its consumer-testing phase of commercializing the self-driving technology. Wayne Cunningham of CNET reports that the mature software drives like a human.

 

About Torc Robotics

Torc Robotics, headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, provides end-to-end self-driving solutions across multiple industries, including automotive, mining, and defense. Founded in 2005, Torc has integrated its components and systems on ground vehicles ranging from consumer SUVs to 300-ton mining trucks—in safety-critical environments. Torc first gained notice when it developed the self-driving software stack for Virginia Tech in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. As one of three winners of the DARPA Urban Challenge, Torc has commercialized this technology through partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their Tier 1 suppliers.