All the data self-driving cars take in from cameras looks like this

Self-driving cars are almost too observant, taking in information from light-emitting LiDAR sensors, radar equipment, microphones, and cameras. But all the information a car gleans from the outside world still has to be wrangled to be useful. 

Cruise's fleet of self-driving cars testing in San Francisco take in petabytes of data each month from its sensor suite on the road and in simulation, similar to other configurations other self-driving car companies have on autonomous vehicles. A petabyte is a million gigabytes, by the way.

So to corral all this information, Cruise — through a hackathon event — created an open-source data visualization platform called Webviz. Other autonomous vehicle companies offer different aspects of the self-driving process, like Baidu's Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform. Now Cruise is opening up its application for anyone who works with robotics. Read more...