Zheng Z.

The recent Waymo service disruption during the PG&E power outage is a solid case study in resiliency and edge-case handling at scale. When power went out across large parts of San Francisco, traffic signals went dark everywhere at once. For autonomous vehicles, that’s not a normal operating condition. It changes how the intersection should behave across the entire city. Waymo vehicles are designed to handle dark signals safely, but this wasn’t an isolated scenario. The outage pushed a large number of vehicles into the same rare state simultaneously. That surge exposed pressure on the system’s control plane, where remote confirmation is used to resolve ambiguity. The autonomy stack itself kept working, but the volume of edge cases slowed decisions and led to fleet pauses. Waymo recovered by temporarily pausing service, resuming once power was restored, and rolling out changes to better recognize infrastructure outages, reduce dependence on remote confirmation during correlated events, and recover faster when abnormalities happen at city scale. The lesson here is familiar from distributed systems: edge cases stop being “edge” when they happen everywhere at once. Resiliency isn’t about preventing every failure. It’s about detecting issues quickly, understanding the root cause, and recovering safely under stress. These moments are painful, but they’re also what harden real-world systems.

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Excited to Teach Again at UCSC Silicon Valley Extension. As high-speed design challenges grow more complex, understanding signal and power integrity isn’t optional — it’s essential. I’m teaching "Comprehensive Signal and Power Integrity for High-Speed Digital Systems" at UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension — a practical, in-depth course designed for working professionals who want to upskill or refresh their knowledge in high-speed PCB and system design. We go beyond theory to explore: ✅ Advanced SI/PI concepts ✅ Design and simulation techniques ✅ Common pitfalls in real-world systems ✅ Tools and workflows used by leading engineers If you're looking to strengthen your hardware design expertise, this course is for you. Learn more or enroll here: https://lnkd.in/gfA4_dW5 Let’s keep pushing the limits of performance — one signal at a time. #SignalIntegrity #PowerIntegrity #HighSpeedDesign #HardwareEngineering #UCSCExtension #PCBDesign

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I work closely with several leading autonomy and robotics companies in the Bay Area 🚗🤖 and regularly connect with engineers across planning, perception, simulation, and robotics systems. One trend I’m seeing across many teams: strong systems engineers are increasingly in demand. The stack (often C++ / Python) matters, but what matters more is deep domain experience in robotics or autonomous systems, particularly around safety, evaluation, validation, and fault handling. If you’re working in this space or curious about what’s happening across AV and robotics, feel free to reach out. #robotics #autonomoussystems #physicalAI

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4 Comments

It all starts here 🌉 ​ ​ The San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market to welcome the Uber-exclusive robotaxi, powered by Nuro and Lucid, expected to begin in late 2026.​ ​ On-road development with our Robotaxi Engineering Fleet is now underway, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in our Global Robotaxi Program. ​ ​ Over the coming months, more than 100 Nuro-driven Lucid Gravitys will join the fleet as we continue to test, validate, and advance the future of safe, sustainable rides.​ ​ The future is on its way! ⚡​ #AutonomousVehicles #Technology #Innovation #Partnership #ElectricVehicles

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It all starts here 🌉 ​ ​ The San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market to welcome the Uber-exclusive robotaxi, powered by Nuro and Lucid, expected to begin in late 2026.​ ​ On-road development with our Robotaxi Engineering Fleet is now underway, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in our Global Robotaxi Program. ​ ​ Over the coming months, more than 100 Nuro-driven Lucid Gravitys will join the fleet as we continue to test, validate, and advance the future of safe, sustainable rides.​ ​ The future is on its way! ⚡​ #AutonomousVehicles #Technology #Innovation #Partnership #ElectricVehicles

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If someone asked me to step into a car with no driver, do you know what my response would be? “ABSOLUTELY!”   This past week, my family and I had our first Waymo experience and it did not disappoint. Having personally worked on self-driving cars while I was at Stanford, I have to say that the technology has certainly advanced in a positive way. The user experience was mostly great (2 pieces of feedback below) and the safety aspects were outstanding. The Waymo that we were in was a Jaguar equipped with 2 screens: one for the front passenger, and one for the rear passengers so we could all see what the car was seeing. The Waymo was able to detect people walking, skateboarding, and scootering at a much farther range than a human could. It even could detect and highlight other Waymos! The car provided clear prompts on wearing seatbelts and how to unlock and open the door to get out. The Waymo obeyed all traffic lights and signs. It yielded to pedestrians and knew when it was safe to make a left while yielding to the other drivers that were going straight.   We only had 2 critiques. The first was that it was not very intuitive to find the pickup spot from the Waymo mobile app. We had to walk about 400 feet around a corner. Fortunately, we had about 5 minutes to find our car and it had our initials spinning on the top of the locked car. There is something satisfying about unlocking the doors with the app. The second critique was that as we were approaching our destination, we were prompted with a few additional nearby drop off location options, so we could change for a cost. It would have been better if the initial drop off location was as close to the desired destination as possible.   All in all, we really enjoyed the experience and used the service 2 more times on our trip! Excellent work Dragomir Anguelov, Eric Munoz, Srikanth Thirumalai, Mizuki McGrath, Satish Jeyachandran, Omer Baror, Rafael Aldana, Cedric Dupont, Vinutha Kallem, Nick Webb, and everyone at Waymo. Bring the technology to Houston. We’re ready!   Watch the short video to hear our raw and honest amazement from our first autonomous ride!

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The Waymo AV disruptions in SF after Friday’s power outage highlight a fundamental systems issue—most likely related to loss of map availability. Tesla drivers reported similar behavior. A robust AV stack should always maintain an onboard fallback map. Relying solely on live connectivity is fragile—especially during emergencies or in low-connectivity regions. I first ran into this issue years ago while driving in the Santa Cruz Mountains—no signal, no map, and no one around to ask for directions… like pre-GPS era 😊

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6 Comments