Ford Motor is now ready for its new development as they are going to spend $1 billion in order to take over robotics in building its ambitious goal of having fully driverless cars on the road by 2021. This big reveal was announced on Friday, February 10, which came a few months after the Pittsburgh start-up Argo AI was created by two graduates of Carnegie Mellon University robotics program.
The two graduates were recognized as Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander. Right now, Salesky is currently working on self-driving cars which is also a high-profile Google project which was known as Waymo. Meanwhile, Rander also had done the same kind of engineering at the ride-hailing service Uber before these two had teamed up for the launching of Argo, Washington Post reported.
Right now, Ford is willing to spend $1 billion investment over five years. This unusual revelation will mark a next step for Ford's journey in building a vehicle which requires no steering wheel or brake pedal by 2021. This has been the vision of the chief executive Mark Fields which he laid out last summer.
This is likely one of the realizations that Ford is trying to catch up with some other leading brands like GM, Audi, Volvo, Waymo, and Uber, according to the professor of school's autonomous vehicle. Further, Ford is continuing on Salesky and Rander to hire about 200 employees the next year as they are still working on the core technology of the virtual driver system.
The research will generally be focused on a driver systems will is capable of operating the so called SAE Level 4. It is a step that is way more advanced that any of today's demonstration systems. Ford has already said that they're hoping to have level-4 commercial vehicle ready for sale by 2021, PC World reported.
