Autonomous-vehicle developers around the world have been working for several years to teach self-driving cars to understand at least some basic hand gestures, initially focusing on signals from cyclists. Generally, developers rely on machine learning to improve vehicles’ abilities to identify real-world situations and understand how to deal with them. At Cruise we gather that data from our fleet of more than 200 self-driving cars…

But we realized that our machine-learning models don’t always have enough training data because our cars don’t experience important gestures in the real world often enough…

We at Cruise found a creative solution to the data gap: motion capture (or mo-cap) of human gestures, a technique that game developers use to create characters. Cruise has been hiring game developers—including me—for expertise in simulating detailed worlds, and some of us took on the challenge of capturing data to use in teaching our vehicles to understand gestures.
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