Toyota partners with Tesla to develop self-driving tech with low-cost cameras

Toyota owned Woven Planet has joined hands with Tesla Inc to develop advanced self-driving technology without expensive sensors such as lidars. The two companies together will focus on developing autonomous driving technology by using low-cost cameras, reports Reuters.

Woven Planet has said that it is able to use low-cost cameras to collect data and effectively train its self-driving system. The Toyota-owned company claims that this technology will help drive down costs and scale up the technology. It also said that gathering diverse driving data using a massive fleet of cars is critical to developing a robust self-driving car system, but it is costly and not scalable to test autonomous vehicles with expensive sensors.

Tesla has been betting big on cameras to collect data from over one million vehicles on the road to develop its automated driving technology. The company is focusing more on cameras than other sensors. Its partnership with Woven Planet can assist the EV company to develop the technology faster.

"We need a lot of data. And it's not sufficient to just have a small amount of data that can be collected from a small fleet of very expensive autonomous vehicles," said Michael Benisch, vice president of Engineering at Woven Planet. He also said that the company is trying to demonstrate that it can unlock the advantage that Toyota and a large automaker would have, which is access to a huge corpus of data, but with much lower fidelity.

Woven Planet is claimed to use cameras that are 90 per cent cheaper than sensors that it used before and can be easily installed in fleets of passenger cars. The company said that a majority of data coming from low-cost cameras increased its system's performance to a level similar to when the system was trained exclusively on high-cost sensor data.