Yosuke Higashi '18

I’ve been working at Waymo (a.k.a Google self driving car project) since July 2018 after graduating Swarthmore with Engineering and CS majors. I’m a software engineer on the Planner team, so my job is to contribute to code that generates the trajectory the autonomous vehicle should follow. As you might expect, building a Planner that can safely and smoothly drive in any scenario that we might encounter on the road is an extremely challenging problem, and it has been really exciting to be a part of the effort to build this technology. Most of what I’ve worked on has been related to improving behavior around intersections, such as reacting to traffic controls and navigating unprotected turns. I work closely with the Perception team that’s responsible for detecting/classifying traffic controls, and the Prediction team that’s responsible for predicting the behavior of other actors - my job (along with others on the Planner team) is to reason about those inputs and generate a safe and comfortable plan for the Waymo to follow.