Google’s driverless vehicle sister company Waymo has announced a new autonomous driving research tool called Waymax, which promises to help developers address complex Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning challenges in autonomous driving, robotics and computer vision.

It says it has contributed to the research community through our Waymo Open Dataset initiative and through our academic publications in top conferences, and its next chapter in this collaboration with the community is Waymax, which “can unlock new research horizons in the simulation and planning agent domains”.

Waymo says simulation is a critical tool for testing and evaluating autonomous driving system performance, which is why it invests heavily in realistic simulation environments (such as its Simulation City) to evaluate the performance of the Waymo Driver.

Waymo’s own simulation tools benefit from tens of millions of real-world autonomous miles collected by the Waymo Driver. In developing the Waymax simulator, researchers focused on building a more powerful and more easily accessible tool for researchers than what exists today.

(Picture – Waymo)