WHAT IT IS
Waymo Driver is Waymo’s self-driving system, descended from the autonomous driving project Google began in 2009. Several kinds of sensors — lidar, cameras and radar — capture the surrounding environment, and perception, prediction and planning modules then drive the vehicle. Waymo operates commercial, safety-driverless robotaxi services with this system in several cities.
Why it matters
It was early to run commercial, safety-driverless robotaxi services and continues to operate them across multiple cities, moving autonomous driving from testing to public passenger service.
Key specs
- Form
- Vehicle-mounted self-driving system
- Sensors
- Lidar, cameras and radar
- Service
- Safety-driverless robotaxi service in multiple cities
Related concepts
Object Detection
From “what is in the image” to “what, where, and how many”
Semantic Segmentation
Colouring every pixel: not a box around the object, but a colouring book
Safety, Alignment & Prompt Injection
A model optimises the proxy we wrote into the loss, never the thing we actually want — the gap between them is the whole alignment problem