Waymo

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Waymo

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legal form Limited Liability Company
Seat Mountain View (Santa Clara County, California)
management John Krafcik (CEO)

A Toyota Prius modified to a “Google Driverless Car” as a test vehicle.
Toyota Lexus RX 450h interior view

Waymo is a technology development company for autonomous vehicles . Waymo continues the work of the project Google driverless car (Google's driverless car) the company Alphabet continued and was founded in December 2016 as a subsidiary of the alphabet. The car's system software is called Google Chauffeur (as of 2014). The project was initially led by Sebastian Thrun , a former professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University and co-inventor of Google Street View . Jaime Waydo was chief engineer until 2018.

history

Thrun's team in Stanford had already developed the Stanley robotic vehicle , which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and was awarded the US Department of Defense of $ 2 million .

In December 2011 it became known that the Internet company Google had been granted a US patent for the technology for operating autonomous vehicles after several years of development . According to the company, Google's test fleet had already covered approx. 257,000 km with limited driver influence and more than 1,600 km without driver involvement.

In May 2012, Google received the first approval of an autonomous vehicle in the US. The approval was for the test on public roads in the US state of Nevada . However, the condition was that there was someone behind the wheel who could intervene if necessary. The Google robot car is said to have been driving safer than a human driver as early as December 2013.

In May 2014, Google presented its robot car for the first time to a group of journalists who no longer found any difference in driving behavior between a human driver and a self-driving system. However, Google stated that driving in rain and snow still poses problems. Google co-founder Sergey Brin had named the year 2017 as the start for the mass market in 2012, and in 2014 the head of the project, Chris Urmson, postponed a mass market start between 2017 and 2020.

For a long time, Google tried to find a suitable car manufacturer for its technology package Google Driverless Car, which is continuously being developed on models from Toyota ( Lexus ), Honda , Audi and VW and favored Tesla Motors for this .

As of May 2014, Google began building 100 of its own electric test vehicles and testing the first prototypes of this new type of vehicle without steering wheel, brakes and accelerator with physically needy and other interested people.

At the end of 2014, Google presented a fully functional prototype that is limited to a maximum speed of 40 km / h in order to forego costly safety features such as airbags .

In May 2015, Google presented an accident report. According to its own information, Google had more than 20 vehicles in use. Over the past six years, they had covered more than 2.7 million kilometers, 1.5 million kilometers of which were computer-controlled. During this time, the Google car was involved in eleven accidents: the self-driving car was not to blame for any of the accidents, and no person was injured in any of the accidents. In February 2016, Google first admitted complicity in an accident in which there were no injuries.

Google has been working with Fiat Chrysler since mid-2016 and is using Chrysler Pacifica Plug-In Hybride as a new platform.

Waymo

In December 2016, Alphabet announced that it would outsource the development of technology for self-driving cars to an independent subsidiary, Waymo .

In May 2017 it was announced that Waymo was working with travel agent Lyft on the development and sale of self-driving cars.

After a report from June 2017, work on the self-developed Google Car with an electric drive was stopped.

In March 2018 a cooperation with Jaguar Land Rover was announced. Over the next few years, 20,000 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles with Waymo technology are expected to complete up to a million trips a day.

The commercial service Waymo One was launched on December 5, 2018, although it is initially limited to individuals in the so-called Early Rider Program .

The Waymo Via service was officially launched in March 2020 , for which Waymo claims to have raised $ 2.25 billion from a group of investors.

Test drives

Autonomous car from Google, 2017
Autonomous car from Google, 2017

By May 2015, the 20 robotic vehicles covered around 16,000 kilometers per week on their own, a little less than the average American per year.

On May 15, 2015, Google announced that the self-driving vehicles would leave the test track and drive on known routes in Mountain View (California) from the summer of the same year .

In the fall of 2017, Waymo introduced the first self-driving vehicles to be completely free of human supervision. Up until now, a person always had to be available in the driver's seat for safety in order to take over the wheel in an emergency. In the latest generation of Waymo vehicles, this is no longer necessary. The driver's seat can remain unoccupied. However, so far, the vehicles have only been used in a sparsely populated suburb of Phoenix , which makes low demands on the car in terms of the complexity of the traffic situation.

Market opportunities

In the long term, the focus should be on providing a service - for example with driverless taxis - and not necessarily on the sale of private vehicles. Google's venture capital investment arm, Google Ventures , invested around $ 250 million in the app-based taxi service Uber in August 2013 . So far, driverless cars from Google can only drive on routes that are completely mapped and whose traffic situations are frequently updated. If, for example, there are no traffic lights on the routes driven in the database, the traffic light signal has been ignored by the cars so far (as of 2014).

Lawsuit against Uber

Waymo accused Uber of company secret theft, patent infringement and unfair competition, even though Google Ventures owns large stakes in Uber. By taking over the young company Otto, Uber is said to have obtained information from Waymo projects, as Otto founder Anthony Levandowski was recently employed by Waymo. Alphabet Inc. then acquired shares in Uber competitor Lyft for $ 1 billion. Out of court, Uber agreed to make a settlement payment of $ 245 million to Waymo.

technology

Technology and cars were developed in cooperation and a. developed with Audi. However, a prototype presented to the public on May 28, 2014 was an in-house development by Google. The model is electrically operated and limited to a top speed of 40 km / h. The software cannot currently recognize instructions from roadside police officers. The use of the car in heavy rain or snowfall is also not possible and recognizing traffic lights in strong backlighting leads to difficulties.

Google's robotic cars contain approximately $ 150,000 in equipment including a $ 70,000 laser scanning system (as of 2012). The system is based on independent learning through recording and interpreting the environment. The roof mounted rangefinder HDL-64E is a laser scanner from Velodyne with 64 independent laser beams, with which the vehicle can generate a detailed 3D map of the surroundings. The software compares the generated map with high-resolution maps.

Law

The legal framework for autonomous driving has not yet been clarified in German-speaking countries. Numerous regulations, such as the setting up of warning triangles in the event of an accident, have to be re-regulated for autonomous steered vehicles .

Film documentaries

Web links

Commons : Waymo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Test Driven Google Car . April 30, 2011. Retrieved May 5, 2014.
  2. ^ Adam Fisher: Inside Google's Quest To Popularize Self-Driving Cars . In: Popular Science . September 18, 2013. Retrieved May 5, 2014.
  3. Andreas Donath: Are you starting now? Apple hires Waymo's chief engineer for autonomous cars . In: MacLife , June 15, 2018. Retrieved September 2019. 
  4. ^ John Markoff : Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic . In: The New York Times , October 9, 2010. Retrieved May 5, 2014. 
  5. Article on Google Driverless Car: Driverless car: Google awarded US patent for technology (English). In: BBC News , December 15, 2011. Retrieved May 1, 2014.
  6. Article on the first registration of an autonomous vehicle: Lisa Hemmerich: Nevada: Driverless car from Google receives first license ( Memento from December 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). In web portal: netzwelt , May 8, 2012. Accessed May 1, 2014.
  7. Article on the claim that computers are better drivers: Google Revolution: Computers are replacing drivers . In: Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten , December 25, 2013. Accessed May 1, 2014.
  8. Article on Google's self-driving car: Thomas Schulz (May 15, 2014) Test drive in Google Self-Driving Car: This car can do without you . In news website: Spiegel Online . Retrieved May 29, 2014
  9. Google's Sergey Brin: You'll ride in robot cars within 5 years . In: CNET .
  10. Liz Gannes: Here's What It's Like to Go for a Ride in Google's Robot Car. Recode, May 13, 2014, accessed July 10, 2017 .
  11. Article on the cooperation between Google and Tesla: Matt Brian (May 7, 2013) Elon Musk in talks with Google to bring driverless tech to Tesla cars . In news website: The Verge . Retrieved May 29, 2014.
  12. Article on a possible purchase of Tesla by Google: Mike Kwatinetz (March 3, 2014) Why Google should acquire Tesla . In news website: CNN Fortune . Retrieved May 29, 2014.
  13. Article on Google's own car without a steering wheel (May 28, 2014) Self-driving cars: Google builds its own car . In web news ticker: Heise online . Retrieved May 29, 2014.
  14. Google will bring self-driving cars to the streets from summer In: automobil-produktion.de, May 15, 2015
  15. Wolfgang Stuflesser: Self-driving Google car accident - also possible without a driver . In: tagesschau.de . May 12, 2015. Archived from the original on May 14, 2015. Retrieved on May 12, 2015.
  16. USA: Accident with a self-driving car - Google admits complicity. Spiegel Online , March 1, 2016, accessed March 1, 2016 .
  17. Fred Lambert: Google starts deploying its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans: first prototypes spotted. October 9, 2016, accessed October 14, 2016 .
  18. Project for Google Cars comes into own company called Waymo. Heise , December 13, 2016, accessed December 15, 2016 .
  19. Mike Isaac: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars . In: The New York Times . May 14, 2017, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed May 15, 2017]).
  20. Jens Minor: RIP: Further development stopped - Waymo decommissioned the iconic Google Cars - GWB . In: GoogleWatchBlog . June 13, 2017 ( googlewatchblog.de [accessed March 27, 2018]).
  21. Waymo Livestream Unveil: The Next Step in Self-Driving - YouTube. youtube.com, accessed April 7, 2018 .
  22. Waymo Team: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey. In: Medium. December 5, 2018, accessed January 30, 2019 .
  23. Phil LeBeau: Waymo launches delivery service after raising $ 25.2 trillion. March 2, 2020, accessed on March 8, 2020 .
  24. Linda Hofmann: Google draws accident statistics for robot cars . In: wuv.de . May 12, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2015.
  25. Carsten Knobloch: Google: self-driving cars take off on public roads . In: stadt-bremerhaven.de . May 15, 2015. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
  26. Green lights for our self-driving vehicle prototypes . In: googleblog.blogspot.de . May 15, 2015. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
  27. Waymo's YouTube channel, November 7, 2017: Waymo's fully self-driving cars are here , accessed on November 13, 2017.
  28. CNN Money November 7, 2017: Waymo tests self-driving cars without safety drivers , accessed November 13, 2017.
  29. Article on the Google robot taxi (August 24, 2013) Pioneers in autonomous cars . In website: Österreichischer Rundfunk . Retrieved May 29, 2014.
  30. Article about the Google car (October 25, 2014) Will Google's robot car remain science fiction forever? . In website: Manager Magazin . Retrieved September 19, 2015.
  31. Waymo: Alphabet subsidiary sues Uber for technology theft . In: The time . February 24, 2017, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed January 11, 2018]).
  32. Uber reaches nearly quarter billion dollar settlement with Waymo as trial dismissed . ( 9to5google.com [accessed February 12, 2018]).
  33. a b Google Auto - problem (go) through the city . February 2, 2015. Retrieved May 5, 2014. 
  34. Alisa Priddle: Google disc-less costs of its driverless car tests . In: USA Today , June 14, 2012. Retrieved May 5, 2014. 
  35. Erico Guizzo: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works - IEEE Spectrum . Spectrum.ieee.org. October 18, 2011. Retrieved May 5, 2014.
Videos
  1. Google's own video about Google's own car without a steering wheel (May 27, 2014) A First Drive . In the video portal: YouTube . Retrieved May 29, 2014.