Waymo partners with Walmart to provide Grocery pickups in Driverless Cars.

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Waymo has announced numerous partnerships with multiple Businesses in Phoenix area in a bid to aggressively bring its driverless Cars into the mainstream. This comes after its previous announcement stating that its Cars have covered 8 Million Miles.

The current announced partnerships are as follows:

1. Walmart

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Later this week Walmart and Waymo are launching a test Pilot that will transport customers to and from Walmart stores to collect groceries they have ordered online. Additionally, early riders will also get discounts on their orders.

2. Ahwatuke Foothills Towne Center

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The Ahwatukee Foothills Towne Center is a shopping center in Phoenix and Waymo will provide shoppers and diners rides to it which will of course relieve the users if Parking Space hassles.

3. Element Hotel

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Waymo has tied up with the Element Hotel in Chandler to provide provide selected guests like business travelers who need to commute to and fro from their Offices during frequent stays.

4. AutoNation

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AutoNation is responsible for maintaining the fleet of Waymo's driverless Cars in Phoenix. AutoNation is now offering its customers Waymo driverless rides instead of loaner cars while their own vehicles gets serviced.

5. Avis Group

Image Source : www.avis.com

The Avis Group refuels, recharges and makes Waymo's cars presentable to the customers. They will also be providing Waymos to help users pick up and drop off rental cars, beginning in two Chandler locations.

By providing their technology to widely used services in the Phoenix Area and eventually throughout the US, Waymo is ensuring that it gains wide user acceptability of a technology that is currently to costly to privately own. 

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Self-Driven Car Waymo - How it covered 8 Million Miles in the Real World!

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Waymo is the former self-driving project of Google which is now directly under its parent company - Alphabet. Before we get into the details of the figures published by Waymo, let us try and understand how the Technology in Waymo works:

The Waymo cars are fitted with numerous sensors and are powered by software that enables it to detect pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles, road work and more. This is achieved by LiDAR technology which can create a 3D image of the environment of the Car up to three football fields away coupled with powerful Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning algorithms.

The LiDAR technology works by releasing millions of laser beams per second in all required directions and using the time required for the laser beams to bounce back to its sensor to calculate the distance to the obstacles. The principal is exactly the same as in Radar, the difference being that Lasers are used in LiDAR instead of radio waves. This technology can give extremely accurate distance measurements (+-2Cm).

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The illustration demonstrates how Waymo detects all Cars, cyclists and pedestrians at a crossing. It also illustrates how it uses its machine learning capabilities, which relies on 8 Million Miles/12.87 Million Kilometers (you read that correct) of real world experience, to predict the behaviour of all the road users it has detected.

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In this example, Waymo says that the sensors detect the outstretched left arm of the cyclist and its software is able to predict from this that the Cyclist will be moving to the left side of the lane. On the basis of this prediction the software then makes the Car slow down allowing the cyclist to pass safely in front of it.

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Waymo published that it has driven 8 Million Miles/12.87 Million Kilometers since 2009, which averages at 25,000 Miles/40,000 Kilometers per day. The total distance mentioned would take an average American 300 years to cover. These numbers have been put out by Waymo since everybody knows that Machine learning, much like human learning, gets better and better with experience but unlike us humans, it never forgets what it learns. Waymo presently has a fleet of 600 self-driven minivans in 25 American cities.

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400 residents of Phoenix have already been trialing an app to hail Waymo's Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid Minivans and this has received much attention. The company is further looking to apply its technology to three other areas - logistics, public transportation and personally owned vehicles.

Here is a list of very informative FAQ's published by them : https://waymo.com/faq/

Check out Zoox, another promising self-driving car company that aims to rival Uber with a completely new approach to autonomous cars. 

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Zoox - The self-Driving car that could beat Uber

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Zoox, a self driving car startup is close to raising 500 Million Dollars at a 3.2 Billion Dollar Valuation as reported by Bloomberg Business Week. Given the competition it faces in the space of autonomous Cars from giants like Google, Daimler, Lyft and Uber, that valuation might seem crazy. In order to understand the valuation let us get a bit deeper into the spaces of autonomous driving and how Zoox is different from the competition.

App Cabs not only have to provide a healthier means of earning to Drivers while operating with same fuel costs as traditional Cabs but they also have to be dependent on the work hours put in by the Drivers for Revenue. In India the increasing ride cancellation rate by App Cab drivers is also leading to a lot of disenchantment among users. Given this situation, it is no wonder that all the major companies are looking for the most obvious solution - removing the Driver completely. 

Image Source : Bloomberg

All the major companies have concentrated their efforts in fitting existing Cars with the Technology. Zoox, on the other hand aims to change the concept of the Automobile itself - designing a Car for the Autonomous Technology. Their Car has the following features:

1. It is completely electric.
2. It traverses equally in forward and reverse directions which means that it does not have to turn to go in the opposite direction.
3. It has special screens on its windows to display customized welcome messages.
4. It can automatically make noises to communicate with pedestrians.
5. It can rotate the orientation of its wheels to align them in a 90 degree angle to the body to allow it to traverse like a crab (say bye bye to the parallel parking woes)

Here is a glimpse of  how a Zoox Car perceives the world around itself:

Image Source : Zoox

As you might have guessed from studying the screenshot, the blue boxes are what its AI identified as Cars, purple boxes are people, red boxes are red traffic lights and green boxes are green traffic lights. The thing that differentiates the use of AI in image/pattern recognition from autonomous driving is that in autonomous driving, the AI also has to predict outcomes in the near future to avoid collisions. So basically it not only has to identify the objects it senses correctly but also predict the path they are going to take or not take.

Zoox started in a Garage with just 6 people and now has around 500 employees working at a 130,000 square feet headquarter in Foster City. They are aiming to put their first vehicles on the road by 2020.

Here is there story as covered by Bloomberg:

When do you think autonomous cars like these will become reliable enough to become commonplace around the world? Do leave your comments and reactions below and don't forget to subscribe.