Waymo详细介绍-Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars.pdf-资料库

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars , , N A CORNER of Alphabet’s campus, there is a team working on a piece of software that may be the key to self-driving cars. No journalist has ever seen it in action until now. They call it Carcraft, after the popular game World of Warcraft. The software’s creator, a shaggy-haired, baby-faced young engineer named James Stout, is sitting next to me in the headphones-on quiet of the open-plan https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 1/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic oﬃce. On the screen is a virtual representation of a roundabout. To human eyes, it is not much to look at: a simple line drawing rendered onto a road-textured background. We see a self-driving Chrysler Paciﬁca at medium resolution and a simple wireframe box indicating the presence of another vehicle. , ’ ( ) Months ago, a self-driving car team encountered a roundabout like this in Texas. The speed and complexity of the situation ﬂummoxed the car, so they decided to build a look-alike strip of physical pavement at a test facility. And what I’m looking at is the third step in the learning process: the digitization of the real- world driving. Here, a single real-world driving maneuver—like one car cutting oﬀ the other on a roundabout—can be ampliﬁed into thousands of simulated scenarios that probe the edges of the car’s capabilities. Listen to the audio version of this article: TheAtlantic TheAtlantic Inside Waymo's Secret World for Trainin…… Inside Waymo's Secret World for Trainin Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone. Scenarios like this form the base for the company’s powerful simulation apparatus. “The vast majority of work done—new feature work—is motivated by 4K https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 2/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic stuﬀ seen in simulation,” Stout tells me. This is the tool that’s accelerated the development of autonomous vehicles at Waymo, which Alphabet (née Google) spun out of its “moon-shot” research wing, X, in December of 2016. If Waymo can deliver fully autonomous vehicles in the next few years, Carcraft should be remembered as a virtual world that had an outsized role in reshaping the actual world on which it is based. Originally developed as a way to “play back” scenes that the cars experienced while driving on public roads, Carcraft, and simulation generally, have taken on an ever-larger role within the self-driving program. At any time, there are now 25,000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios. Waymo might simulate driving down a particularly tricky road hundreds of thousands of times in a single day. Collectively, they now drive 8 million miles per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles versus a little over 3 million miles by Google’s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual miles focus on what Waymo people invariably call “interesting” miles in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter miles. The simulations are part of an intricate process that Waymo has developed. They’ve tightly interwoven the millions of miles their cars have traveled on public roads with a “structured testing” program they conduct at a secret base in the Central Valley they call Castle. Waymo has never unveiled this system before. The miles they drive on regular roads show them areas where they need extra practice. They carve the spaces they need into the earth at Castle, which lets them run thousands of diﬀerent scenarios in situ. And in both kinds of real-world testing, their cars capture enough data to create full digital recreations at any point in the future. In that virtual space, they can unhitch from the limits of real life and create thousands of variations of any single scenario, and then run a digital car through all of them. As the driving software improves, it’s downloaded back into the physical cars, which can drive more and harder miles, and the loop begins again. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 3/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic O GET TO Castle, you drive east from San Francisco Bay and south on 99, the Central Valley highway that runs south to Fresno. Cornﬁelds abut subdevelopments; the horizon disappears behind agricultural haze. It’s 30 degrees hotter than San Francisco and so ﬂat that the grade of this “earthen sea,” as John McPhee called it, can only be measured with lasers. You exit near the small town of Atwater, once the home of the Castle Air Force Base, which used to employ 6,000 people to service the B-52 program. Now, it’s on the northern edge of the small Merced metro area, where unemployment broke 20 percent in the early 2010s, and still rarely dips below 10 percent. Forty percent of the people around here speak Spanish. We cross some railroad tracks and swing onto the 1,621 acres of the old base, which now hosts everything from Merced County Animal Control to the U.S. Penitentiary, Atwater. The directions in my phone are not pointed to an address, but a set of GPS coordinates. We proceed along a tall opaque green fence until Google Maps tells us to stop. There’s nothing to indicate that there’s even a gate. It just looks like another section of fence, but my Waymo host is conﬁdent. And sure enough: A security guard appears and slips out a widening crack in the fence to check our credentials. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 4/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic ( ) The fence parts and we drive into a bustling little campus. Young people in shorts and hats walk to and fro. There are portable buildings, domed garages, and—in the parking lot of the main building—self-driving cars. This is a place where there are several types of autonomous vehicle: the Lexus models that you’re most likely to see on public roads, the Priuses that they’ve retired, and the new Chrysler Paciﬁca minivans. The self-driving cars are easy to pick out. They’re studded with sensors. The most prominent are the laser scanners (usually called LIDARs) on the tops of the cars. But the Paciﬁcas also have smaller beer-can-sized LIDARs spinning near their side mirrors. And they have radars at the back which look disturbingly like white Shrek ears. When a car’s sensors are engaged, even while parked, the spinning LIDARs make an odd sound. It’s somewhere between a whine and a whomp, unpleasant only because it’s so novel that my ears can’t ﬁlter it out like the rest of the car noises that I’ve grown up with. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 5/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic There is one even more special car parked across the street from the main building. All over it, there are X’s of diﬀerent sizes applied in red duct tape. That’s the Level Four car. The levels are Society of Automotive Engineers designations for the amount of autonomy that the car has. Most of what we hear about on the roads is Level One or Level Two, meant to allow for smart cruise control on highways. But the red-X car is a whole other animal. Not only is it fully autonomous, but it cannot be driven by the humans inside it, so they don’t want to get it mixed up with their other cars. As we pull into the parking lot, there are whiﬀs of Manhattan Project, of scientiﬁc outpost, of tech startup. Inside the main building, a classroom-sized portable, I meet the motive force behind this remarkable place. Her name is Steph Villegas. ILLEGAS WEARS a long, ﬁtted white collared shirt, artfully torn jeans, and gray knit sneakers, every bit as fashionable as her pre-Google job at the San Francisco boutique Azalea might suggest. She grew up in the East Bay suburbs on the other side of the hills from Berkeley and was a ﬁne-arts major at University of California, Berkeley before ﬁnding her way into the self- driving car program in 2011. “You were a driver?” I ask. “Always a driver,” Villegas says. “Being in the car a lot, I can feel what the car is doing—it sounds weird, but—with my butt.” She spent countless hours going up and down 101 and 280, the highways that lead between San Francisco and Mountain View. Like the rest of the drivers, she came to develop a feel for how the cars performed on the open road. And this came to be seen as an important kind of knowledge within the self-driving program. They developed an intuition about what might be hard for the cars. “Doing some testing on newer software and having a bit of tenure on the team, I began to think about ways that we could potentially challenge the system,” she tells me. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 6/24

2018/11/6 Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic So, Villegas and some engineers began to cook up and stage rare scenarios that might allow them to test new behaviors in a controlled way. They started to commandeer the parking lot across from Shoreline Amphitheater, stationing people at all the entrances to make sure only approved Googlers were there. “That’s where it started,” she says. “It was me and a few drivers every week. We’d come up with a group of things that we wanted to test, get our supplies in a truck, and drive the truck down to the lot and run the tests.” These became the ﬁrst structured tests in the self-driving program. It turns out that the hard part is not really the what-if-a-zombie-is-eating-a-person-in-the- road scenarios people dream up, but proceeding conﬁdently and reliably like a human driver within the endless variation of normal traﬃc. Villegas started gathering props from wherever she could ﬁnd them: dummies, cones, fake plants, kids’ toys, skateboards, tricycles, dolls, balls, doodads. All of them went into the prop stash. (Eventually, the props were stored in a tent, and now at Castle, in a whole storage unit.) ( ) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ 7/24

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Waymo详细介绍-Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars.pdf

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