Autonomous ride-hailing service Waymo will soon venture out of its comfort zone and begin sending its Lidar-equipped Chrysler Pacifica minivans to New York City.
While New Yorkers might start to see one of the five hybrid minivans circling the streets of Manhattan in the near future, they won’t be able to flag one down like they can a Yellow Cab, as Waymo isn’t there to pick up passengers—at least not yet. Instead, the Google-born spinoff is sending a small fleet to roam the densely-populated city in order to map its complex traffic patterns and better improve its service, it claims.
For Waymo, mapping has always been a critical part of training its self-driving model. Even from the beginning (before Google was in the picture), Waymo’s founders Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski used car-mounted cameras for initial research on image-based street mapping. And Waymo’s newest mission in New York is no different, though maybe a bit more mature.
Read the article at The Drive.
