Waymo LLC

Fang Da

Jared Stephen Russell

Nathaniel Fairfield

Michael Epstein

Ioan-Alexandru Sucan

Dong Li

Poonam Suryanarayan

Omer Baror

Jian Leong

Yutaka Leon Suematsu

The technology relates to controlling a vehicle in an autonomous driving mode. For example, sensor data identifying a plurality of objects may be received. Pairs of objects of the plurality of objects may be identified. For each identified pair of objects of the plurality of objects, a similarity value which indicates whether the objects of that identified pair of objects can be responded to by the vehicle as a group may be determined. The objects of one of the identified pairs of objects may be clustered together based on the similarity score. The vehicle may be controlled in the autonomous mode by responding to each object in the cluster in a same way.

Semantic object clustering for autonomous vehicle decision making

The disclosure relates to training models for identification of events likely to cause discomfort to passengers of autonomous vehicles and for assessment of overall ride quality of autonomous vehicle rides. For instance, ride data may be associated with a ride quality value indicative of a level of discomfort and/or a first overall ride quality value indicating an overall ride quality provided by the passenger for the first ride. This ride data may be used to train a model such that the model is configured to, in response to receiving ride data for a second ride as input, output a list of events likely to cause discomfort to a passenger during the second ride and/or such that the model is configured to, in response to receiving second ride data for a second ride as input, output a second overall ride quality value for the second ride.

Assessing ride quality for autonomous vehicles

Aspects of the disclosure relate to controlling a vehicle using a simplified model of an object. In one example, sensor data including a plurality of data points corresponding to surfaces of the object in the vehicle's environment may be received from one or more sensors of the vehicle. A first model may be determined using a subset of the plurality of data points. A set of secondary data points may be identified from the plurality of data points using a point on the vehicle. The set of secondary data points may be filtered from the subset of the plurality data points to determine a second model, wherein the second model is a simplified version of the first model. The vehicle may be controlled in an autonomous driving mode based on the second model.

Generating simplified object models to reduce computational resource requirements for autonomous vehicles

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Fang Da