The Scoop Artificial intelligence made it possible for anyone to build apps. Applied Intuition, the $15 billion startup that supplies the software infrastructure behind self-driving cars, autonomous trucks, mining equipment and military drones, wants to do the same thing for the world of autonomous machines. On Tuesday, the company unveiled Dana, a new service that allows developers to use natural language to simplify the building and testing of autonomous machines. Customers with almost no technical background can collect and label sensor data, run simulations, and validate that a robotic device or vehicle behaves safely in the real world. âImagine you have a teenage son who wants to create an autonomous lawnmower, or a room-cleaning robot. You would need a team of probably 5 to 8 engineers today,â said Qasar Younis, CEO and co-founder of Applied Intuition. âWe want to push that down to virtually one person.â At first, Dana will be available mainly to Applied Intuitionâs large enterprise customers, starting with those in the automotive, trucking and heavy industries, where the companyâs tooling runs deepest. In the coming months, the company plans to add more functionality and self-serve features to allow a wider range of use cases and users, eventually reaching individual tinkerers. The plan marks a new direction for Applied Intuition, which made a name for itself signing up major companies like Porsche, Isuzu and Komatsu, which are willing to pay top dollar for help designing state-of-the-art software. âThe only way we get to intelligence on a billion machines is we make it ubiquitous,â Younis said. He compares this moment in robotics to the web of the mid-1990s, when the idea of a billion websites sounded absurd because building one still required specialists. âI think the use cases that will emerge by lowering the barrier to develop autonomous systems