CLOUD COMPUTING
Dmitri Dolgov, Co-CEO, Waymo
Think of an autonomous vehicle as a rolling edge data centre. For a company like Waymo – owned by Google’ s parent Alphabet – the cloud is essential for training its AI driver but useless for a split-second braking decision. The car cannot wait for a signal to travel to a data centre and back to know it should stop for a pedestrian.
This is why each Waymo vehicle is equipped with a suite of sensors including LiDAR radar and highresolution cameras, generating terabytes of data every hour.
This data is processed in real time by the Waymo Driver, an immensely powerful on-board computer. This edge system performs the critical tasks of perception, prediction and navigation locally.
“ Achieving fully autonomous freeway operations is a profound engineering feat – easy to conceive, yet hard to truly master,” says Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov.“ This milestone is a powerful testament to the maturity of our operations and technology.”
The cloud is used to update the fleet and analyse driving logs – but the immediate, life-saving intelligence lives at the edge.
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