Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research

Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of nuanced and complex multi-agent interactive behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.

The Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge

In this work, we define the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC). Simulation with realistic, interactive agents represents a key task for autonomous vehicle software development. WOSAC is the first public challenge to tackle this task and propose corresponding metrics. The goal of the challenge is to stimulate the design of realistic simulators that can be used to evaluate and train a behavior model for autonomous driving. We outline our evaluation methodology and present preliminary results for a number of different baseline simulation agent methods.

WOMD-LiDAR: Raw Sensor Dataset Benchmark for Motion Forecasting

Widely adopted motion forecasting datasets substitute the observed sensory inputs with higher-level abstractions such as 3D boxes and polylines. These sparse shapes are inferred through annotating the original scenes with perception systems' predictions. Such intermediate representations tie the quality of the motion forecasting models to the performance of computer vision models. Moreover, the human-designed explicit interfaces between perception and motion forecasting typically pass only a subset of the semantic information present in the original sensory input. To study the effect of these modular approaches, design new paradigms that mitigate these limitations, and accelerate the development of end-to-end motion forecasting models, we augment the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) with large-scale, high-quality, diverse LiDAR data for the motion forecasting task. The new augmented dataset WOMD-LiDAR consists of over 100,000 scenes that each spans 20 seconds, consisting of well-synchronized and calibrated high quality LiDAR point clouds captured across a range of urban and suburban geographies (https://waymo.com/open/data/motion/). Compared to Waymo Open Dataset (WOD), WOMD-LiDAR dataset contains 100x more scenes. Furthermore, we integrate the LiDAR data into the motion forecasting model training and provide a strong baseline. Experiments show that the LiDAR data brings improvement in the motion forecasting task. We hope that WOMD-LiDAR will provide new opportunities for boosting end-to-end motion forecasting models.

Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset

As autonomous driving systems mature, motion forecasting has received increasing attention as a critical requirement for planning. Of particular importance are interactive situations such as merges, unprotected turns, etc., where predicting individual object motion is not sufficient. Joint predictions of multiple objects are required for effective route planning. There has been a critical need for high-quality motion data that is rich in both interactions and annotation to develop motion planning models. In this work, we introduce the most diverse interactive motion dataset to our knowledge, and provide specific labels for interacting objects suitable for developing joint prediction models. With over 100,000 scenes, each 20 seconds long at 10 Hz, our new dataset contains more than 570 hours of unique data over 1750 km of roadways. It was collected by mining for interesting interactions between vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists across six cities within the United States. We use a high-accuracy 3D auto-labeling system to generate high quality 3D bounding boxes for each road agent, and provide corresponding high definition 3D maps for each scene. Furthermore, we introduce a new set of metrics that provides a comprehensive evaluation of both single agent and joint agent interaction motion forecasting models. Finally, we provide strong baseline models for individual-agent prediction and joint-prediction. We hope that this new large-scale interactive motion dataset will provide new opportunities for advancing motion forecasting models.