Waymo has declared a new milestone of driving 10 billion miles in simulation which is definitely a crucial achievement since all miles in simulation for its self-driving software are adding up an appropriate training experience.
Waymo has probably got the best experience considering its actual road miles driven — this company is usually fast for pointing out that it has been working on this far longer as compared to others who work in autonomous driving. Well, huge thanks to the head start as self-driving car moonshot project by Google.
Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov told Kirsten Korosec on the Mobility stage Sessions, “At Waymo, we have driven above 10 million miles in the real world and more than 10 billion miles in simulation.”
“And the amount of driving you to do in both of those is a function of the maturity of the system and the capability of the system. If you are just getting started, it does not matter – you are working on the basics, you can drive a few miles or a few thousand or even tens of thousands of miles in the real world, and that is plenty to tell you and allow you information that you need to know to improve your system.”
According to Dolgov, the more advanced you have your autonomous driving system, the more miles you are able to actually require for driving to have an impact. Moreover, your simulation gets even more accurate with your accumulation of real-world driving miles.
Dolgov added, “I think what makes it this good simulator, and what makes it powerful is two things. One is fidelity. By fidelity, I mean, not how good it looks. It is how well it behaves, and how representative it’s of what you will encounter in a real world. And second is scale.”
