Simulation City: This Is Where Waymo Trains, Tests Its Autonomous Vehicles

Waymo, by 2020, had achieved 15 billion miles of simulated driving against 20 million actual driving.

By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 7 July 2021 17:43 IST

Simulation City: This Is Where Waymo Trains, Tests Its Autonomous Vehicles

Photo Credit: Waymo

Waymo uses a robust suite of simulation tools to test and evaluate its cars

Highlights

Simulation City is an advanced system where Waymo tests its cars
Waymo earlier only used CarCraft for this purpose
Waymo has already recorded 15 billion miles of simulated driving

Waymo, an offshoot of Google parent Alphabet, has created a Simulation City system to test its autonomous vehicles and prepare them for the real world. Waymo has been using CarCraft since 2017 but, after finding some “gaps" in it, the company decided on a second programme. Now, Waymo's engineers use both these programmes to test their cars in Simulation City, where the vehicles are trained and tested. The City also helps to validate the input data fed to the “Waymo driver" software.

In a blog post, Waymo said that Simulation City mimics roads in different cities and helps engineers to train the cars and semi-trailer vehicles on roads and conditions before sending the self-driving vehicles on the ground.

Usually, a grey cube with a blue top represents the Waymo vehicles in the City, whereas many green vehicles simulate random cars on the road. These tests are scalable and that's what matters to the company. According to Waymo, by 2020, it had achieved 15 billion miles of simulated driving against 20 million actual driving.

Waymo One Partners With Google Maps to Offer Autonomous Rides

Over the years, the actual tests have fed more data to the simulated tests to an extent that Waymo engineers can now simulate complex details like raindrops or afternoon sun glare in Simulation City. Earlier, these untested situations hampered the autonomous vehicle's perception hardware and led to problems in reading traffic signals under such situations.

The company uses artificial intelligence and realistic camera images for better simulation. To prove the precision of their tests, Waymo simulated dozens of real car crashes in Arizona, US, over a decade. When they replaced one of the two involved vehicles with one of their robot-guided minivans, chances of deaths reduced to almost zero.

Watch: Driverless Waymo Car With Passenger in it Escapes From Technicians

Currently, Waymo has its self-driving vehicles running in the suburbs of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Mountain View. But, with the growing “maturity" of Waymo's autonomous vehicles, the company is optimistic about expanding its business to newer places soon.

Windows 11 has been unveiled, but do you need it? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.