Visit San Francisco, and you can get dropped off at Golden Gate Park byone of Waymo's driverless taxis. LiDAR (light detection and ranging), cameras, and radar allow the autonomous vehicles to "see" unexpected pedestrians, "hear" sirens, and otherwise operate in the real world. They're able to withstand extreme conditions, including fog, rain, wind, and even bugs (the real kind). Will Shepherdson, Engr '13, a product manager with the company's perception team, says his office has a "cricket cannon" to test the sensor's ability to clean bug splats.
There's a name for what Shepherdson does: sensing, a field he first encountered while at Johns Hopkins. As an undergrad, he pursued research in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and worked as a teaching assistant for the course Robot Sensors and Actuators.
"In the autonomous vehicle industry," he says of his career choice, "my professional interests have come full circle with my time as a student."
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