LeCun is right.
Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
41–50 of 223 posts
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#42LeCun is right.
About what
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#43This is ok though because humans drive into flood waters too. Look, you can't make progress without getting your feet wet and then diving straight into the deep end.
Maybe you drive into flood waters, but I don't. That's not a difficult skill to pull off.
We're still in the early days of self driving cars, and as much simulation and miles as they have, they're still constantly getting exposed to real world conditions that are new to them. The world is dynamic, so this will always remain true.
It remains to be seen where we'll converge on capability, incident rate, and acceptance.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#44That's a tough problem - distinguishing wet pavement from deep water. Humans make that mistake frequently. Autonomous vehicles should probably be equipped with a water sensor. (We did that in our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle back in 2005). Then they can enter water very cautiously and see if it's too deep. This may make them too cautious about shallow puddles on roads, though.
By a water sensor do you mean a sensor to detect the water level relative to the chassis? It seems like a very inexpensive downward-facing ultrasound sensor could work.
Is ultrasound less expensive than a moisture sensor?
The problem with both is they effectively require the vehicle to be in the water already. They need something that can tell depth before the vehicle has to slow down.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such detailed database of fine grained road geometry gets stale very quickly, due to road maintenance and road construction. In US highway lanes are shifted sideways frequently.
But are they not continuously updating the road database with their fleet?
For common routes, yes. For getting to John's house, where the path there sometimes floods, no.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they have a pre-existing database of every road, sure. And if it's kept up-to-date at all times in all vehicles.
Isn’t that the Waymo data model, though? They extensively pre-drive every new market, building dense volumetric maps of the entire service area before they begin service, so they essentially do have that database of every road (that they drive on).
Granted, I am not sure exactly how Waymo operates, but I thought that the extensive testing was mostly for legal reasons+just handling edge cases.
I am saying this, because I noticed that they typically start with a low-tier restrictive permit to operate (with a rather small number of cars in the fleet). Then they run it for a year or two, iron out edge cases particular to a given city (e.g., climate particularities, crazy spaghetti junctions in ATL, etc.), and log a lot of data. Then they take that data, go to the city/state, say "we have all this data that demonstrates we were very above the board while running the test pilot program, we are safe, and now we want to expand out of a very limited test pilot program."
And then it either goes well (Bay Area, LA, etc.) or goes off the rails for other reasons (often failing earlier for entirely unexpected reasons, like the pushback against it from taxi driver unions in NYC).
My point being, I could be entirely wrong, but I don't think that they literally map every single inch of the road before being allowed to operate. I just don't see it as being possible in any large populated city, given how often things change there. Just in 3 years living at one apartment in Seattle, I had a road directly adjacent to me changed from 2-way to 1-way, and then had 3-4 lanes that were basically highway entrances/exits (a block away from me) created and the whole area being rerouted entirely.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#47It's an interesting case of whether it's possible to infer the condition of wading and avoid having to install a sensor specific to a one in a million trips circumstance.
The inference would come from standing water slowing down the vehicle and likely require steering correction, in combination with some machine vision for identifying standing water.
Then there's the advantage of being Google and having hundreds of thousands of people in the same area using Google maps and navigation. Accelerometers in phones can detect crashes pretty reliably. There's a good chance they can reliably detect deceleration from standing water and report the location of the hazard.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#48"recall" = applies software update
Also I think it's wrong to call something a recall if it's not owned by customers. Waymo is a service.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#49"recall" = applies software update
aw, I was having fun imagining 3,800 Johnny cabs just immediately changing route to go to headquarters.
Re: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
#50"recall" = applies software update
Recall makes for better headlines.