Autonomous vehicle companies use simulators to train their self-driving systems and teach them how to react to “agents” — things like pedestrians, cyclists, traffic signals and other cars. To have a truly advanced AV system, those agents need to behave and react realistically to the AV and to each other.
Creating and training intelligent agents is one of the problems Waymo is trying to solve, and it’s a common challenge in the world of AV research. To that end, Waymo on Thursday launched a new simulator for the AV research community that provides an environment in which to train intelligent agents, complete with prebuilt sim agents and troves of Waymo perception data…
The simulator is now available on GitHub but cannot be used for commercial purposes. Rather, it’s part of Waymo’s larger initiative to give researchers access to tools — like its Waymo Open Dataset — that can help accelerate autonomous vehicle development.
