Waymo

Part of what makes Waymo’s system successful is its millions of miles of real world and simulated driving experience.

Today, Nuro announced it will be delivering with 7-Eleven in Mountain View, California, and Waymo announced its grocery delivery service will launch in 2022.

The trucks are driving autonomously on highways between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. A human takes control once a truck exits the highway.

Waymo’s robotaxis face unique challenges driving in San Francisco, where there’s a one in three chance of fog every day.

Waymo’s vehicles will be driven manually at all times. The goal is to improve its autonomous driving technology. Waymo said “we don’t have any immediate plans to launch [a robotaxi service] in New York City.”

From cyclists riding against the flow of traffic to nudging over to let another car pass on a narrow street, watch a handful of typical events Waymo’s autonomous vehicles deal with in San Francisco.

According to Waymo, it has nothing to do with its autonomous driving technology being confused, a mapping issue, or a maneuver it’s trying to perfect.

The approval from the California DMV does, however, come with major caveats.

In this weeks episode, Steve and Mike discuss the expansion of Waymo service into SF, the recent Locus Robotics milestone – and Steve interviews RightHand Robotics CEO, Yaro Tenzer.

“We’re winding down our commercial LiDAR business as we maintain our focus on developing and deploying our Waymo Driver across our Waymo One (ride-hailing) and Waymo Via (delivery) units.”

The all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles are equipped with Waymo’s fifth-generation autonomous driving system. All rides will include a human safety driver.

Waymo is opening an office in Pittsburgh, joining a group of competitors already well established in the Steel City.

Waymo provides a glimpse at its SimulationCity software environment that it uses to test and validate driving algorithms.

This is the second funding round for Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. In 2020, Waymo raised $3 billion.

Waymo One ride hailing service is now visible as an ride-hailing service option to Google Maps users searching for directions within the Phoenix AZ, Waymo service area.

Joel Johnson, the passenger in the Waymo robotaxi that was confused multiple times by construction cones, discusses what went wrong.

Watch a Waymo One robotaxi in Chandler, Ariz. gets confused multiple times by traffic cones – and evade human assistance.

New motion dataset offers object trajectories and corresponding 3D maps for over 100,000 segments, each 20 seconds long and mined for interesting interactions with cars, people, and more.

Waymo announced a couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t be expanding its robotaxi service in Arizona any time soon. I took that as a sign of Waymo gearing up to start testing in a new city – San Francisco, perhaps. Today, Waymo announced just that. It has begun limited testing in San Francisco, marking its…

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) yesterday released its annual Disengagement Report, which breaks down the number of times a human driver takes over control of an autonomous driving system being tested on the state’s public roads. The DMV released reports for 29 companies for the period from December 2019 to November 2020. Waymo (29,944.69)…

In what appears to be yet another dig at Tesla, Waymo today said it will no longer use the term “self-driving” to describe its vehicles. The Alphabet subsidiary will instead refer to its work as “fully autonomous driving technology.” According to Waymo, this isn’t just a matter of terminology. It said it will use more…

In 2020, autonomous vehicles left other technology applications in the dust. Other areas of robotics receiving funding or merger and acquisition activity included supply chain automation, surgical robots, and quadrupeds.