Waymo says it built a better benchmark for comparing robotaxis to humans

The biggest difference between this new model — which Waymo calls the Reference Driver — and its predecessor is that it is able to reproduce a human driver’s behavior in the run-up to a crash. Previously, Waymo’s models (and other industry models) focused on replicating “last-second, reactive” human maneuvers, according to the company.

The Reference Driver, meanwhile, can “simulate the internal ‘surprise’ a driver feels during a conflict, providing a more human-like benchmark for autonomous driving systems that was previously impossible to automate at scale,” Arkady Zgonnikov, an assistant professor at TU Delft, said in a statement.

Waymo says this new driver model can be adapted to model a “wide range of road user behaviors beyond collision avoidance,” and that it is better-equipped to be applied to “large test sets with thousands of scenarios.”

“The model can represent and evaluate numerous complex, real-world crashes in a virtual environment, identifying performance improvements with unprecedented speed and efficiency,” the company wrote.

Waymo wants others to collaborate on pushing the Reference Driver further, too. The company said Wednesday that it is making the research code for the model available under an academic, non-commercial license that allows it to be used for research, teaching, personal experimentation, and scientific publication.