The Alphabet subsidiary specializing in autonomous vehicles recently announced that it wants to map New York City. Even though Waymo will not be authorized to run its vehicles in autonomous mode on the streets of New York City, mapping densely populated cities is essential to making advancing autonomous driving technologies.
Vehicles will not yet operate in autonomous mode
After mapping the city of Los Angeles in a few weeks, certainly early next year, Waymo will therefore run five vehicles (with drivers) on the streets of Manhattan. Waymo will map the city from the south side of Central Park to the Financial District and through the Lincoln Tunnel. In each of Waymo’s Jaguar I-PACEs, there will be two people. A driver and a co-pilot to direct the driver and monitor the vehicle software in real time to assess the performance of the mapping.
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Although Waymo vehicles will not operate autonomously on the streets of New York, they will be all equipped with the latest generation of Waymo Driver. This fifth generation of the Waymo Driver includes a LIDAR 360 sensor installed on the roof, offering a vision in height to the vehicle, which allows it to perceive the objects that surround him. Four other LIDAR sensors are installed on the vehicle, on the sides, to detect closer objects. The 360-degree vision system is also able to spot pedestrians over 500 meters away.
New York City is very interesting for Waymo
According to Nick Smith, a spokesperson for Waymo: “The mapping process is an essential part of our operations. First of all, we drive Waymo vehicles on public roads and collect information with our suite of sensors. Then we take that information, clean it up and annotate it automatically or manually with features like crosswalks, road edges, sidewalk heights, intersections, etc. Finally, we subject our newly created card to quality control testing ”.
The New York City weather conditions are interesting for Waymo. Indeed, the city is known for its heavy rains, even hurricanes, in summer and dense snowfall in winter, conditions that autonomous driving systems have not yet fully understood. The Alphabet subsidiary is convinced that driving in New York will allow its technologies to progress and the company to assess how the sensors behave in wet and cold conditions in real life.
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