Waymo’s Self-Driving Jaguars Arrive With New, Homegrown Tech

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Waymo’s Self-Driving Jaguars Arrive With New, Homegrown Tech
The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars

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Waymo (as it was christened in 2016) soon gave up building its own vehicles, but kept making the bits that replace the human driver, chiefly the sensors and the computer systems.
The best way to ensure that everything going into the car meets Waymo’s standards, Jeyachandran says, is to do it themselves.
“We realized that off-the-shelf doesn’t meet the requirements needed for self-driving.” With the financial backing of Alphabet and a head start in the field, Waymo could make the equipment it needed to see and navigate the world.
In 2017, Waymo reported it had dropped the price of its lidar by more than 90 percent from the prior year.
Until this round, Waymo was funded by its parent company, Alphabet.
So, many self-driving companies have moved to make their own goods wherever necessary, and possible.
“They’re all trying to build their own hardware,” says Kevin Peterson, CEO of the sidewalk delivery robotics company Marble, who worked on the Darpa Grand Challenges with many of the industry’s current leaders.
“They’ve got the money, and they’ve got these needs that self-driving cars have and nobody else does.”
But Waymo had a big head start; it has already gone through multiple generations of hardware and developed several types of lidar for different uses.
One big change with the I-Pace sensor suite is the rooftop lidar, which handles both long- and mid-range scanning (the Pacifica uses separate lidars for different distances).
Lidar lead Simon Verghese declined to divulge specs, but says the resolution on the new unit is 10 times better than its predecessor, thanks to “new architecture.” And it’s just one more step forward.
“I doubt this is the last lidar we build,” he says.
Because it delivers detailed information that doesn’t require interpretation, lidar is the marquee self-driving sensor

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