Waymo to make self-driving data set public to fuel research

In a bid to shorten the lengthy process of teaching cars to drive themselves, Waymo announced on Wednesday that it would make “the largest fully self-driving data set ever” freely available to the research community “in the hope of accelerating the development of machine perception and self-driving technology”.

The Alphabet unit, which began life a decade ago as Google’s self-driving car project, said it hoped the release would fuel research into self-driving technologies by adding to the body of data that could be drawn upon.

Its data, collected using cameras

and sensors on Waymo vehicles in a variety of environments and road conditions, include 1,000 high-resolution driving scenes that have been “painstakingly labelled” to indicate the presence of 12m objects such as pedestrians, cyclists and signage.

Labelled data are vital to the development of self-driving algorithms, which must be “taught” to interpret the world around them by being fed millions of examples.

As Waymo is widely considered to be the most advanced company in the self-driving technology space, the move is likely to be seen as a concession that its go-it-alone approach is falling short of sky-high expectations.

Banks such as Morgan Stanley and Jefferies have valued the unit at $175bn and $250bn, respectively — multiples of the world’s largest carmakers — on the belief that it could soon disrupt the notion of car ownership and offer a driverless Uber-like service in the world’s big cities.

In a briefing to journalists on Tuesday, Drago Anguelov, Waymo’s head of research, pushed back against the idea that the release was a concession. “It’s not an admission, in any way, that we have problems solving these issues,” he said.

“We felt, and it was not just us . . . that the field was currently hampered by a lack of suitable data sets.”