The race to develop self-driving vehicles took a new turn on Thursday, when Google parent Alphabet Inc filed a lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc accusing it of stealing technology.
Alphabet contends that a manager at its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo LLC took technical data with him when he left to launch a competing venture that went on to become Otto, Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit, in a reported US$680 million deal.
“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time and expense of independently developing their own technology,” Waymo said in a San Francisco federal court filing.
Waymo is calling for a trial to stop Otto and Uber from using what it said is patented technology.
Waymo also wants unspecified damages in what it described in court documents as “an action for trade secret misappropriation, patent infringement and unfair competition.”
‘CALCULATED THEFT’
The company argued that a “calculated theft” of its technology “reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo’s expense.”
Responding to a request for comment, an Uber spokeswoman said in an e-mail that “we take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees seriously and we will review this matter carefully.”
The California-based ride-sharing service last year acquired commercial transport-focused tech start-up Otto as it pressed ahead with its pursuit of self-driving technology.
Anthony Levandowski, a cofounder of Otto, a 90-person start-up, was put in charge of Uber’s efforts to develop self-driving technology for personal driving, delivery and trucking.
Waymo’s lawsuit contends that Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary files from a highly confidential design server to a laptop in December 2015.
A week later, after removing a data storage card, Levandowski reformatted the company laptop in what the suit maintains was an attempt to erase any trace of what happened to the downloaded data.
CRITICAL COMPONENT
The suit is focused on proprietary information about lidar sensors, which use lasers to scan and essentially enable vehicles to “see” what is around them, according to the lawsuit.
The information stored on the Waymo server wound up at Otto, it said.
Waymo said it has invested tens of millions of dollars in the technology.
“Thanks in part to this highly advanced lidar technology, Waymo became the first company to complete a fully self-driving trip on public roads in a vehicle without a steering wheel,” the suit said.
After downloading confidential information regarding Waymo’s lidar systems and other technology while working at Waymo, Levandowski attended meetings with high-level executives at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco in January last year, the lawsuit said.
By the end of that month, Levandowski officially formed a venture that would become Otto and resigned from Waymo, according to the court filing.
A self-driving truck built by Otto made a pioneering delivery of beer in Colorado in November last year.
An 18-wheeler made the 190km trip from Fort Collins through the center of crowded Denver to Colorado Springs using only its panoply of cameras, radar and sensors to read the road.
Uber is also trying out a self-driving car service in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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