To get its autonomous or self-driving cars ready for real life, Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google) has been busy creating a virtual world where it can drive its cars on artificial streets and highways.
The virtual world, called Simulation City, is one of two virtual worlds used by Waymo to train, test and validate its driving software that'll be used by self-driving cars moving on the open road.
The Verge has some interesting details:
Simulation is a critical piece of the puzzle for autonomous vehicles. These programs allow Waymo’s engineers to test — at scale — common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases, the learnings from which it then feeds into its real-world fleet.
The key word is “scale” because these simulators allow Waymo to far exceed the distances its vehicles travel on public roads. As of 2020, Waymo said it’s simulated 15 billion miles of driving, compared to just 20 million miles of actual driving.
In Simulation City, those real-world miles are now informing the miles driven in simulation, meaning the company has more confidence in the validity and reliability of the virtual situations it constructs for its vehicles.
“Once that relationship is established in an increasingly strong way, we need fewer additional miles driven in the real world to basically say what we learned in simulation is correct,” Frankel said.
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