Can A.I. make self-driving cars a reality? Waymo weighs in on the future

Shortly after one of its autonomous minivans was involved in a crash while operating in manual mode, Waymo got a slice of stage time at Google I/O to discuss its self-driving cars, using that time explain the role of artificial intelligence in autonomous driving. In a Medium post elaborating on the points made in the I/O keynote, Waymo Chief Technical Officer Dmitri Dolgov said it uses A.I. to train self-driving cars to identify their surroundings in a manner similar to human drivers. Waymo started out as Google's internal self-driving car project before being spun off into a separate unit. There was a significant amount of cross-pollination between autonomous car engineering and the Google Brain A.I. program during the early stages of both projects, according to Dolgov. Among other things, this allowed error rate for pedestrian detection in self-driving cars to be reduced 100 times in just a few months, Dolgov said.