Waymo is coming to Toronto. But the road to get there will be an often snow-covered one — and experts say that will take time and training data to overcome.
The U.S. company said Friday it plans to start testing the streets of Canada’s biggest city, with drivers behind the wheel, in the coming days, as part of its “mapping and safety validation work.”
The goal is for riders to be able to hail one of their driverless cabs by 2028 in the city, Waymo said.
The tests will take place at all hours of the day and night and across all days of the week, in an effort to make sure the technology can adapt to Toronto’s “distinct driving conditions.”
The company didn’t expand on what those conditions were. But Steven Waslander, professor and director of the University of Toronto’s Robotics Institute, says that likely means snow.
“The big differentiator is really our winter,” Waslander said of Toronto compared to other North American cities where Waymo is already up and running.
“The winter challenge is one that [Waymo] haven’t demonstrated commercially yet.”
Waymo first hit the road in warmer cities with little precipitation like Los Angeles and Phoenix, Ariz., and most of the cities it offers ride-hailing services in today are much warmer and dryer than Toronto. That’s for good reason, according to Waslander, who says running autonomous cars in the snow comes with all kinds of extra challenges.
Autonomous cars rely on cameras, radar and lidar systems — which map the 3D environment using light — to situate themselves. All of that information is fed into a computer, which makes decisions about where to turn or when to hit the brakes, augmented by lots and lots of training data.
Adverse weather conditions can pose a challenge for all of those systems, says Krzysztof Czarnecki, an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo.
Cameras and other sensors can get covered by snow and ice, making them less effective. Heavy falling rain and snow can also reduce how well the driving system detects objects — as can snow covering cars or street signs.
Cameras, radar panels and lidar sits atop a Waymo all-electric Jaguar I-Pace SUV in San Francisco, on Aug. 20, 2021. The systems help the autonomous vehicles navigate their environment. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)
Czarnecki says as autonomous vehicles are trained on more data, they get better at detecting obscured objects like snow-covered signs. But he says autonomous systems still struggle to make sense of them more than a human would.
Other drivers also change their behaviour when snow flies, Czarnecki says, making autonomous vehicles more likely to get “confused” by their actions or those of pedestrians.
Adjusting to those kinds of elements takes time, as Czarnecki says the vehicles will need to be tested and fine-tuned in those environments.
“The more challenging the weather, the more challenging the engineering.”
That’s why some autonomous cars already on the road in Canada don’t run in poor weather.
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Read More: Waymo is coming to Toronto. Will its self-driving cars be winter-ready?
