Simulation is essential to Zoox’s mission. Zoox uses simulation to develop our driving software, validate safety, and analyze our real-world performance. Our team’s work directly impacts how rapidly and successfully Zoox will achieve its goals.

For our simulators to successfully validate our autonomous driving stack, we need to realistically model and replicate the worlds we will be driving in. This includes modeling and simulating human behaviors, specifically traffic and other pedestrian behaviors. The challenge is that the simulated humans need to show realistic and representative behavior — we want our agents to jaywalk as a human might do, and also replicate a wide range of behaviors that we encounter while driving in real cities.