Waymo, the company that recently spun out from Google’s self-driving-car project, intends to make autonomous vehicles affordable for the masses.
In its push to commercialize its technology, the company built its own in-house sensors, such as radar and lidar, that provide critical information for vehicle operations. By doing so, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said, the company has reduced the cost of these sensors by more than 90 percent.
A single lidar unit, in its formative stages, once cost $75,000, a price that would surely put the cost of an overall vehicle out of reach for most consumers. With a price at a fraction of the cost, autonomous technology could reach more motorists and commercial fleets.
There are no specific plans yet for selling self-driving cars. But while speaking Sunday at the Detroit auto show, Krafcik was flanked by one of the company’s 100 Chrysler Pacifica minivans outfitted with the latest sensor stack, and he said they’ll begin testing them on public roads in California and Arizona by the end of the month.
“What we’re bringing to the market is a self-driving platform that will allow us to deliver products and services that make getting around safe for everyone,” he said. “That’s why we’re focused so intently on getting the technology right, and getting it to scale and mastering the hardware and software necessary to build a better driver for fully self-driving cars.”
Waymo has opted to build its own radar and lidar, he said, because the company could do it more accurately and cheaply than by buying off-the-shelf components from other suppliers.
In addition to the medium-range lidar that has traditionally sat on the roofs of vehicles–and given self-driving cars a telltale profile–the company’s engineers have developed short-range lidar that’s affixed toward the bottom of vehicles to better sense small objects. They’ve also developed long-range ones that can detect an object the size of a football helmet from a distance of 200 yards, Krafcik said.
With radar, which has been used in automotive applications for almost two decades, Krafcik said Waymo engineers have widened its field of view and innovated to make it possible to track other vehicles approaching from behind. Waymo also fine-tuned the technology to ensure it is as accurate when sensing slower moving bicyclists or pedestrians as it is when sensing other vehicles.
“This sensing hardware, in turn, provides our software and computers with a wealth of information to learn from,” he said. “It’s a virtuous cycle. As our software gets more sophisticated, this integration makes the entire suite more robust and cost effective.”
Waymo says its cars have already been getting safer. The California Department of Motor Vehicles requires companies testing in the state to report annual figures associated with the number of times its autonomous technology disengages and the number of times a human driver intervenes to prevent potentially dangerous situations from developing.
In 2015, the company’s cars testing in California had a disengagement rate of 0.8 times per 1000 miles driven—the rate at which test drivers took over from the self-driving software. In 2016, Waymo said, that rate fell to 0.2 times for each 1000 miles of its California testing. The company released the numbers in advance of the California DMV’s annual release of the industry-wide disengagement reports, which are due on Feb. 1.
from Car and Driver BlogCar and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/2je6V7M
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment