Toyota joins Tesla in developing self-driving tech with low-cost cameras

Toyota Motor (7203.T) unit Woven Planet has joined Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) in trying to advance self-driving technology without expensive sensors such as lidars.

Woven Planet told Reuters it is able to use low-cost cameras to collect data and effectively train its self-driving system, a “breakthrough” that it hopes will help drive down costs and scale up the technology.

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, it said…

“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,” Michael Benisch, vice president of Engineering at Woven Planet, said in an interview with Reuters.