TORONTO — A Toronto-based self-driving AI company is partnering with Volvo to scale the production of driverless trucks south of the border, with hopes to bring the vehicles to Canadian roads one day.
Waabi Innovation Inc. announced Tuesday it will be providing its generative artificial intelligence driver system to automaker Volvo to develop autonomous trucks at a commercial scale.
"It's very clear now that AI is at the forefront of everything," said Raquel Urtasun, the founder and CEO of Waabi, in an interview.
"The physical world is about to be kind of disrupted and trucking is the first application where you're going to see robots, really, at this scale," she said.
Urtasun said scaling the production of self-driving commercial trucks means integrating them with a built-in AI self-driving system.
For that, "we provide the first piece: the virtual driver," she said.
The truck -- Volvo's VNL Autonomous -- has redundant systems built into it as additional safety measures should the primary system fail for some reason.
Urtasun said Waabi's self-driving AI can understand the nuanced decision-making process of the machine.
"What this system does is that it interprets and understands what it's seeing, what it's hearing and then uses those interpretations to reason about what action they can do — and decide on the best manoeuvre," Urtasun explained.
Currently, the AI company has autonomous commercial trucks operating with safety drivers in Texas but hopes the trucks will be ready to run on roads without a safety driver on board by the end of the year.
For Canada, Urtasun said it will be two to three years before the technology makes its debut.
"There is a lot of work to be done (for) Canada to catch up on the regulatory front," she said.
Urtasun said the company's target clients could be big retailers and transportation companies such as Walmart and Ikea.
The trucks will be manufactured at Volvo's flagship New River Valley assembly plant in Dublin, Va.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 4, 2025.
Ritika Dubey, The Canadian Press
