Fasten your seat belts: Google's autonomous vehicle is on the way

Google's autonomous vehicle is open to everyone: Waymo announced that after the pilot period, the application for ordering the travel service in the autonomous vehicle manufactured by it throughout San Francisco was opened to everyone. On the other hand, the safety authority in the USA raised concerns in light of several incidents of malfunctions that raised questions about the safety of the vehicles and the risk of an accident.

Waymo is Google's technology company that began developing autonomous vehicles as early as 2009. In 2015, Google began operating the autonomous vehicle on public roads. Today, the company operates Robotaxis services, a fully autonomous vehicle without a driver, in Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco. Soon the service will also start in Los Angeles, and in Austin, Texas.

Google invested huge sums in the development of the autonomous capability, and developed the hardware itself, which includes sensors and a vision system based on 360-degree observation sensors around the vehicle, object detection sensors at a distance of 300 meters from the vehicle, and radars that notice other vehicles around and other objects in motion. To activate the vehicle, the user has at his disposal "start driving", "locking", "stop" and "help" buttons.

The vehicle's learning function predicts other vehicle routes in complex traffic scenarios. The software uses a graphical neural network to discern Waymo's interactions with other vehicles while predicting possible scenarios.

Last March, the company received permission to operate the autonomous vehicles in Los Angeles as well, this after a year of test trips around the city. The company, located in California, operates the vehicles in several other cities near San Francisco.

In the meantime, the competitors are already preparing to accelerate the development of their autonomous vehicles: companies such as General Motors and Amazon are increasing the pace of work to launch their vehicles, in a move that seems likely to expand to other companies in the near future.