Waymo’s self-driving vehicles have driven some 10 million miles on actual roads and that’s an incredible milestone but it only represents a fraction of what the company’s autonomous driving system has driven in simulation. The company has revealed that the self-driving system has driven over 10 billion miles in simulation.
Highlighting the fact that the company has a solid engineering foundation with ample opportunity to innovate and accelerate the deployment of self-driving cars, Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov revealed that the company has put its autonomous driving system through 10 billion miles in simulation.
It was further revealed that Waymo runs the equivalent of 25,000 self-driving cars around the clock in simulation. Whenever one of them picks up something new from its experiences, it shares its findings with the other cars in the fleet.
Simulation driving is obviously not going to be enough and Waymo still needs to perform more real-world driving before it actually deploys self-driving cars on a massive commercial scale. Nevertheless, the simulation testing will certainly aid in that objective.
Dolgov didn’t reveal what the company has learned from the simulation testing but did point out that “”The amount of driving you do in both of those is really a function of the maturity of your system, and the capability of the system.”
"We've driven ten billion miles in simulation," says CTO Dmitri Dolgov at #TCMobility pic.twitter.com/NHtL90wJLX
— Waymo (@Waymo) July 10, 2019
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