After recently filing a lawsuit against Uber and accusing it of stealing self-driving technology, which it believed would affect at least US$500 million in technology-derived value, Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, further requested the court last week to ban Uber’s self-driving technology. Anthony Levandowski, head of human and vehicle development, continues to be involved in research and development.
Anthony Levandowski used to work as an engineer on Google’s self-driving car team. After he founded Otto, it was acquired by Uber about half a year ago, and began to promote the development of Uber’s self-driving car technology. Therefore, Waymo believes that Anthony Levandowski will use Due to his position, he brought the laser radar component design used in Waymo's autonomous vehicle design to Uber, and then used it in Uber's current investment in autonomous vehicle technology research and development projects.
Uber earlier demonstrated the design of its lidar sensing element called "Fuji" in a court statement and emphasized that its four-lens module design is different from Waymo's single-lens module, but Waymo believes that Uber is trying to hide the theft of technology and even deliberately hides the content of relevant documents, calling on the court to ban Anthony Levandowski from continuing to participate in Uber's autonomous vehicle technology research and development project.
According to patent documents submitted by Waymo earlier, even though Uber currently uses the "Fuji" lidar sensing element design, some modules are still almost the same as the design used by Waymo. At the same time, Waymo has further questioned Uber's self-driving car technology is developing too fast, so it is suspected that its research results are not based on independent results.
However, Uber emphasized that the infringing project alleged by Waymo has not yet entered the prototype product stage, so it has not yet constituted actual infringement.
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