Hey smores, I'm Shannon Morse, welcome to Morse Code. I do tech reviews and tutorials.
If you're looking for in depth tech and gadget content, you've come to the right place.
This week I'm partnering with Waymo to share how they're building the world's most experienced
driver. I was fortunate enough to be invited down to Arizona back in 2019 to experience a
Waymo ride up close and personal. Riders in areas where Waymo operates can download the Waymo One
app and use Waymo's ride hailing service to get picked up in a car that is operated by the Waymo
Driver - that's the name of Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology.
When I took a ride with Waymo, it was autonomous, also operated by the Waymo
Driver. There was a specialist sitting in the car with us to monitor the ride,
but they didn't control any aspect of the vehicle in any way.
The Waymo Driver has continued to improve since I last visited - and they've opened
up the fully autonomous offerings to the general public using Waymo One
as of Fall 2020. Health and safety policies and procedures have also been enhanced through
their fully-owned fleet, and Waymo works closely with their team, riders, partners,
along with federal, state and local authorities to advance the capabilities of the Waymo Driver.
All of this to say - Waymo's the FIRST and currently ONLY
company to operate a commercial, fully autonomous ride hailing service.
So building upon that video I did back in 2019, with all the newness happening,
I wanted to share how Waymo is implementing their technology to be the worlds
most experienced driver. I was invited to a Waymo roundtable to ask questions that have been
on my brain. My main questions are always about security, privacy, and in this case, safety.
Waymo is using so much technology behind the scenes to create this experienced driver,
not just on the road, but also using simulations. See, a human driver can only spend so much time on
the road - ya gotta sleep sometime! And there are only so many hours in a day, even for the Waymo
Driver. So real world experience will be limited by the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day.
So how can the technology gain more experience? With simulations. In this case, fully autonomous
driving technology uses simulations to not only to take generated test drives,
but to also build in real-world factors that can change the Waymo Driver's reactions. This
gives the Waymo Driver hours upon hours of experience that it can then use to predict
behaviors of the environment around the vehicle whenever it's out of the road.
Take this snippet for example - when the Waymo Driver comes to a 4-way stop,
and there's another vehicle there - what might that vehicle do? Well, no one can read the
mind of the driver in that other car - but the fully autonomous driving technology can predict
it's behavior based on the environmental factors, taking all options into account.
Is the car in a turn lane? Then it has a high probability of turning. Is it in a straight
lane? Then it'll probably go straight. Will it make a U-turn? Maybe. So the Waymo Driver will
determine the probability of certain actions, and make a determination based on the behavior.
There's a reason why I am comfortable getting in a vehicle operated by the Waymo Driver
technology - and that's because the computational power happening alongside the sensors, like Lidar
and the cameras that are soaking up data from all around the vehicle,
is going to give the Waymo Driver much more data to determine it's actions than a human could with
our own two eye. I think it's incredibly cool then the Waymo Driver acts on an environmental change
that I didn't even see til after I felt the car shift - that happened in 2019 - someone who was
parallel parked on the road opened their car door, and the Waymo Driver slowed slightly,
and manuevered around the car door and the person getting out, faster than how I would've reacted.
Waymo recently published a very interesting safety study about how a simulated Waymo Driver performs
with reconstructions of real life fatal crashed, taking place in the Chandler
operating domain. This is the first time, ever, that a fully autonomous system currently being
used out on public roads has also been publicly evaluated for performance during these kind of
scenarios, so this can show how autonomous driving technology could improve road safety - and as
someone who's been hit by a woman driving a car while looking at her cellphone, while I was a
passenger on a motorcycle, I feel like that human error wouldn't happen with autonomous driving
technology because the computer isn't gonna be lookin' at a cellphone while on a public road.
Waymo found that when the Waymo Driver was the initiator,
100% of collisions were avoided, and when it was the responder, 82% of collisions were avoided,
with 10% of those being mitigated, but also the Waymo Driver was able to reduce likelihood of
major injury dramatically for drivers involved. I'll link in the description to the full paper.
And then there's this question, which is always brought to me when I talk about
autonomous driving technology: If I'm to use fully autonomous driving technology,
how do I know it won't get hacked? Who has access to my data?
My RL friends ask me this because they know I go to hacker cons and research this kinda stuff.
Good question! Let's talk about it. So,
Waymo has this publicly accessible Safety Report where you can read up on some of
the ways they protect against malicious attacks or hacks, and I'll link that below.
([https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/2020-09-waymo-safety-report.pdf](https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/2020-09-waymo-safety-report.pdf)
pg 19) As an example, they consider the physical security of the vehicle,
like potential access points and they access the possible risks.
Waymo works with their OEM partners to identify and mitigate any of these vulnerabilities.
Since their technology goes through structured testing and simulations, those also contribute
to the testing and validation. So, for example, the software goes through a verification process
whenever new releases are available and they also identify and mitigate potential
safety risks. **So those physical attacks are definitely assessed solidly for mitigation.**
What about remote attacks? In this case, Waymo has build multiple layers of security to prevent
outside access to servers or the vehicle. Security is a part of the design stage,
with layers of defenses to protect safety critical functions, like steering and braking from any
kind of unauthorized communications, including the vehicle control commands. They published
their safety framework last October. According to their Safety Report, quote "While on the road,
all communications (e.g., redundant cellular connections) between the vehicles and Waymo are
encrypted, including those between Waymo’s operations support staff and their riders.
The vehicles also don't rely on constant communications connections to operate safely."
If the Waymo Driver notices any abnormal behavior, this triggers incident response procedures.
And lastly is Privacy, a big topic on this channel. Since Waymo is an Alphabet copany,
they use Google's infrastructure to support their operations, but customer personal information
isn't shared with Google outside of the service relationship, and Waymo is quite transparent
about what kind of data they collect and how it's shared via their privacy policy
([https://waymo.com/privacy/](https://waymo.com/privacy/)).
The discussion I was able to have with Waymo was pretty eye opening. It was very cool being
able to dig into the technology to get a better understanding of how data is
being used to build the worlds most experienced driver,
and it also answered a lot of my questions about the safety and security of tech.
Given that Waymo just announced in February this year that they're expanding testing into
San Francisco, I hope I can take another ride with a Waymo Driver soon. I've driven in San
Francisco. Many times. It gives me anxiety. I would much rather let Waymo Driver do the work.
This was such a fun partnership to work on and I hope you enjoyed learning more from Waymo!!
Comment below and let me know if you have any questions about the tech! Thanks again
to my smores for subscribing and watching. I'm Shannon Morse and I'll see ya soon. Bye yall!