Waymo opens audio sensor data to researchers



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Waymo publishes its first multimodal sensor data set for autonomous driving, which will be available to researchers free of charge on its website, hoping to accelerate progress in this area.

The "high resolution sensor data" is intended for researchers from universities and other private research companies, said Drago Anguelov, lead scientist and chief researcher of Waymo, at a press briefing.

Waymo, Google's self-driving unit, said the dataset included video of 1,000 driving segments in various driving environments with a 360-degree view. It also includes frames and lidar images with vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and carefully labeled signage.

The open Waymo data set could help researchers advance in two-dimensional and three-dimensional perception and advance in areas such as domain adaptation, scene comprehension and behavioral prediction, the company said.

Waymo vehicles have traveled 10 million kilometers on public roads in 25 different locations, said Anguelov, and only "a small percentage" of the data collected over the last 10 years is now available online.

"It has been deliberately chosen to be diverse and representative of the research problems we face," he said. The whole data "is not easy to make accessible to researchers … it requires an industrial infrastructure to deal with."

"It's only the first cut," said Anguelov. "We want to publish benchmarks on key space issues and organize competitions around them, and in the longer term we will seek to further expand datasets based on community feedback." . "

He said that while data sharing may reveal self-driving technology issues, the developing field needs a direction to "ask the right questions".

"Our intention was not to influence public perception, but to contribute to the world of research," said Anguelov.

Anyone who accesses the data must adhere to a license agreement establishing a "good balance" between the opening and non-use by competitors of the information produced, said Vijaysai Patnaik, Waymo's leading product during the briefing.

Patnaik said the advances of researchers using the data would benefit Waymo and the industry as a whole.

"We are all part of the research community," he said. "We understand how difficult it is for anyone to collect this data – they would have to build a car, install sensors and calibrate them."

The dataset is available at the address waymo.com/open.

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