Waymo LLC is an American autonomous driving technology development company. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. Waymo operates a commercial self-driving taxi service in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area called “Waymo One”, with Chandler, Arizona fully mapped. In October 2020, the company expanded the service to the public, and it is the only self-driving commercial service that operates without safety backup drivers in the vehicle. Waymo also develops driving technology for use in other vehicles, including delivery vans and Class 8 tractor-trailers for delivery and logistics.
Google’s development of self-driving technology began on January 17, 2009, at the company’s secretive X lab run by co-founder Sergey Brin. The project was launched by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots.
In 2008, the Street View team launched project Ground Truth, to create accurate road maps by extracting data from satellites and street views. This laid the groundwork for the Google’s self-driving car program. In December 2016, the project was renamed Waymo and became a new start-up company that is part of Alphabet.The name Waymo was derived from its mission, “a new way forward in mobility.” Waymo underwent further test on its cars on public roads after its separation from Google.
Waymo’s cars use high-resolution cameras and lidar (light detection and ranging, which is a way of estimating the distance to another object by bouncing light and sound off things). This technology helps the self-driving car identify where other cars, cyclists, pedestrians, and obstacles are and where they’re moving. (investopedia.com).
According to en.wikipedia; investopedia.com and pitchbook.com. Source of photos: internet
