Waymo has launched Waymax – a lightweight simulator developed specifically for autonomous driving research. Compared with other simulators, Waymo says Waymax offers a range of unique features and capabilities previously unavailable. These include the following key features:
- Lightweight – It enables researchers to conduct experiments efficiently and iterate quickly;
- Informed by troves of real-world data – To model realistic driving behaviors, Waymax can leverage the 570+ hours of real-world driving examples from multiple cities that are present in the Waymo Open Motion Dataset;
- Hardware-accelerated – Waymax is written entirely in JAX, making use of in-graph compilation to deliver blazing-fast simulations;
- Multi-agent – so researchers can analyze and model the complex behaviors among multiple road users and unlock new insights into multi-agent systems.
Researchers can access Waymax software on GitHub and use it straight out of the box. It already incorporates the minimal representation of objects and bounding boxes adopted by the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, which eliminates the need for users to run their own perception system from raw sensor data, and comes bundled with metrics and pre-built sim agents, streamlining the research process.
Waymax is the latest development from Waymo, which has previously contributed to the research community through its Waymo Open Dataset initiative and through its academic publications in leading conferences. The company views simulation as a critical tool for testing and evaluating autonomous driving system performance, which is why it has invested so heavily in realistic simulation environments (such as its Simulation City) to evaluate the performance of the Waymo Driver.
To be an effective evaluation tool, a simulator requires huge volumes of carefully curated data that are representative of the real world. Not only does it need to look real, but it’s critical that other road agents – such as human drivers, pedestrians and cyclists – behave realistically in a simulated environment, matching the experiences our vehicles would encounter in the real world. This is why sim agents and their connections to planning research have become increasingly important. Waymo says its own simulation tools benefit from tens of millions of real-world autonomous miles collected by the Waymo Driver. Hence it is thrilled to now be able to share its unique capabilities with the academic community through Waymax, which it describes as the first-of-its-kind, lightweight simulator.