Council Post: How Open-Source Data Can Drive Automotive Innovation

Sophisticated innovations in artificial intelligence, computer vision, tactile sensing and more are the driving forces behind smart and autonomous vehicles. Progress on these fronts will be crucial to making smart cars even more intelligent and bringing self-driving cars to fruition, but industry stakeholders are also concentrating on another key to automotive innovation: open-source data, which can provide more shared tools to propel innovative developments. In one of the most prominent illustrations of this trend, Waymo, the AV subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, made the Waymo Open Dataset public in 2019. Collected by sensors in Waymo's self-driving cars, the dataset features high-resolution multimodal sensor data that covers a variety of environments, from dense urban centers to suburban landscapes, offering insights into a wide range of driving conditions. Its release came on the heels of Lyft and Argo AI's rollouts of their own open-source datasets, and has since then been followed by the release of the Ford Autonomous Vehicle Dataset and Google's open-sourced Android Automotive OS, among others.