Sam Shueh
BRG Realty
Silicon Valley Office Building
San Jose, CA 95124
I used to work in the area before the birth of Google and when Nvidia was a new game card company. I know there has been some work undertaken by Google to explore self driving and experiment with Lidar as sensor and that is about it.
I had the opportunity to see a self driving fully functional Waymu Ride finally at Castro Road and El Camino Real near its self-driven headquarters. It was a Jaguar loaded with $100,000 multiple sensors, radar and lidar.
Waymo makes hardware developed in house including sensors and better cameras, radar, and lidar. The rotating sensors allow 360 degree views, while lidar can detect up to 1,000 ft away. Besides carrying Apple Pay and Google Pay cards the passanger is alone without a driver now. As passenger inside he needs to push buttons like "hello", "lock", "pull over", and "start ride". It is now in 5th generation robo-taxis. A more refined cheaper butmore sophisticated system employs deep learning architecture using graphic neural network to emulate benchmarks for trajectory prediction.
Waymo One is a fully automated ride sharing service. One down load apps to request to ride with no driver to keep passangers company. It has been available in Phoenix area, San Francisco and bits of Los Angele. Passanger(s) will be able to watch what the driver sees on the screen.
According to Wymu it is not 100% fail safe. Data suggests while it is 2-3 more times safer than human directed vehicles. Weather, road condition, and traffic patterns can add causes for accidents.
For me, right now is looking at a steering wheel moving without a driver talk to a robot. That will come with more experience getting used to.
Sam Shueh, BRG Realty,Silicon Valley. (408) 425-1601 Sshueh at Gmail.com
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