Ottawa company teaching autonomous vehicles to ‘see’ snow, drive in bad weather

When a major snowstorm hits Ottawa, most residents retreat indoors, griping about the weather and the heaping piles of snow they’ll soon have to shovel. But for Fahed Hassanat and his team at Sensor Cortek, a big dumping of snow is cause for excitement. Snow can be hard to distinguish for sensors, which are often obscured and confused by bad weather, to detect, making it even more difficult to train self-driving vehicle software and algorithms. “You have the snow, you have the rain, you have the fog, you have the dust,” said Hassanat. Automakers Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG abandoned Argo AI, their autonomous vehicle company, last October, saying they don’t see a path to profitability for the project.