Autonomous transportation company Waymo and delivery company UPS have expanded their partnership to cover Class 8 trucks equipped with Waymo Driver. The partnership is between UPS and Waymo Via, the division that focuses on delivery, and it arrives just in time for the anticipated uptick in delivery demand for the holiday season.
YouTube will be hiding the dislike count on all videos from public view, keeping the thumbs-down button but hiding the overall count of how many other people have clicked it. The decision follows a trial to YouTube to see whether masking negative feedback would make for less harassment, as well as reentering exactly what it was added for in the first place.
Alphabet's Wing has teamed up with Walgreens to bring drone-based goods delivery to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The new offering will involve a small drone fleet that'll be established in the store's parking lot, enabling its customers to place an order online, which is then packed into a small container, attached to a drone, and sent to the customer's location.
Waymo is pulling the plug on its ambitions to be a LIDAR supplier, with the autonomous vehicle company set to be the only customer for its homegrown sensor tech. LIDAR - or light detection and ranging - sensors have become commonplace in developing self-driving vehicles, though Waymo had hoped to push adoption of the technology in other industries.
Waymo is starting up autonomous ride-hailing in San Francisco, though don't expect to be able to summon a self-driving cab any time soon. Though the Google spin-off's Waymo One service currently offers public rides in Phoenix, AZ, its new Trusted Tester program will be a more exclusive experience.
Alphabet has started up a new robotics company, Intrinsic, with Google's parent firm looking to make smarter industrial 'bots. The announcement comes shortly after Alphabet sold Boston Dynamics - known for its attention-grabbing human and animal inspired robots - to Hyundai, but it seems Intrinsic will focus on a very different area of the field.
Alphabet's Wing has released its OpenSky drone piloting app in the US, aiming to make it easier for UAV operators - whether individuals or companies - to figure out where they can fly without falling foul of FAA and other rules. The app initially debuted in 2019, though was originally only available in Australia.
Google parent Alphabet has been working on "a moonshot" for the electric grid, with a secret project in its X R&D division aiming to figure out how to make power use more stable, and more green, than it is today. The research, revealed at the White House Leaders Summit on Climate, has been underway for the past three years.
Waymo's CEO is stepping down, Alphabet's autonomous car company has confirmed, with John Krafcik handing over the digital reins to the driverless vehicles to two new co-CEO instead. Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana - currently Waymo's COO and CTO - will both be responsible for Waymo moving forward, as the company considers how best to expand its robotaxi ride-hailing service.
Alphabet's "moonshot factory" X is working on a new project codenamed "Wolverine," according to a new leak, and it may involve a wearable that facilitates super-hearing capabilities. The project is described as top-secret at this time and named after the popular superhero character Wolverine. The codename Wolverine wearable project reportedly picked up steam back in 2018, resulting in multiple prototypes.
Google is notorious for retiring apps and services, whether those were in wide use or not. That doesn't apply to just software either and the company has sunset more than a handful of unsuccessful hardware projects that would have caused smaller companies to fold. Not Google, of course, for whom experiments, big or small, are a fact of life. The latest to join the dreaded Google Graveyard is Loon, the moonshot turned "Other Bet" that would have brought the Internet to places where towers and cables dare not go.
Waymo is drawing a line in the sand for driverless terminology, announcing today that it will no longer refer to its vehicles as "self-driving" and arguing that the industry needs more consistency in how it refers to cars that can operate themselves. Though the language change may seem slight, the Alphabet-owned company concedes, it's actually key to making sure human drivers know just what is and isn't required from them in future vehicles.