Waymo have unveiled their 5th-generation Waymo Driver, the combination of hardware and software that guides the company’s AVs. According to Waymmo, the new tech can spot a car door opening a city block away, give trucks the ability to see debris hundreds of metres ahead on the highway, help vehicles peek around blind spots and more.
The new driver is the result of more than a decade of work. It brings together new lidars, cameras and radars, and it’s informed by 32 million self-driven kilometres on public roads , plus over 16 billion km of simulation.
The system includes a rooftop “360 Lidar,” which provides a bird’s-eye view of the vehicle and objects around it, and four lidars on the sides of the vehicle to detect closer objects. Long-range cameras and a “360° Vision System” can spot pedestrians and stop signs more than 500m away. Peripheral cameras look around objects, like other vehicles, to reduce blind spots, and the imaging radar system detects the velocity of objects..
Thanks to a simplified design and manufacturing
process, Waymo managed to deliver the new driver at half the cost of the
previous generation. The company have already manufactured and integrated the
first of their new sensors into the Jaguar I-Pace platform, and are planning a
scaled deployment.