Driverless car development boosted as Volvo releases research data

But data stored on research and development vehicles or in the IT infrastructure of OEMs will only deliver limited improvements. Long-range data releasedThe two firms released a free, curated dataset called Cirrus containing long-range lidar data from Volvo’s fleet of test vehicles. The raw data from Luminar’s lidar sensors can detect objects ahead of the car up to 250m away and marks a shift in the data and information available to developers. Previous publicly available information has relied on shorter-range, lower-resolution point clouds and uniform scanning patterns, so, while it’s been interesting, its usefulness has been debatable. This is reflected in the dataset, which also includes uniform lidar data and corresponding camera images, and annotations for reference.