does Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk's "cost saving" cameras only
Lidar is much less accurate in the rain.
Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
51–60 of 498 posts
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…
Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?
With human drivers: traffic light turns green. The first car starts driving. The 2nd car waits 2 seconds and then starts driving. The third car waits another 2 seconds (4 seconds total) and then starts driving. The fourth car waits another 2 seconds (6 seconds total) and then starts driving. etc.
With computers driving: traffic light turns green. All cars simultaneously start driving. It'd be like a train but without the efficiency.
Similarly, with human drivers: some jackasses drive into the box and the light turns red. Now perpendicular traffic is either fully blocked or must proceeed slower to maneuver around the jackasses. With computer drivers, they shouldn't intentionally break the law and they should have plenty of sensors to figure out that they cannot make it through the box.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Ironically, a properly sealed EV system would better deal with a flood. Combustion engines have issues due mostly to the air intake and exhaust.
Are EVs typically "sealed" by default? If not, how is going through the effort to "seal" an EV different than installing snorkels for ICE cars?
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#54Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.
Humans don't handle all corner cases. People can be slow to react to completely novel or surprising situations. There will be corner cases where humans generally do better than a machine, but the simple rule to slow down and come to a halt if things look too weird or confusing will almost always be the right answer.
Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#55Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?
Same reason there's less gridlock when people obey traffic lights and other rules of the road and don't brake randomly. If every car on the road drove itself then there would never be traffic.
This is literally not true, roads still have finite capacity, and sometimes demand exceeds capacity.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just get a jeep snorkle
[flagged]
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, a properly sealed EV system would better deal with a flood. Combustion engines have issues due mostly to the air intake and exhaust.
You'd need to ensure every electrical connection is in a waterproof location which I'm pretty sure is not a thing for any standard car manufacturing. Cabins are also rarely watertight. AFAIK your best bet is a diesel with a snorkel, and hope things have dried off before you need to restart the engine.
If cabins are water tight you risk carbon monoxide poisoning
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#59I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
I don't think there's a good solution right now. You can't just go based on surrounding traffic because humans are also stupid and flood their cars all the time. You could maybe use short-wave infrared cameras combined with ground penetrating radar, but it'll get real expensive so probably not commercially viable. I think the only "good" solution is to have the car be overly paranoid, and if it detects water on the r…
> Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings.
FTA
> the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”
> But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#60Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.
They never advertised that they did. Its not even real true AI. They just struggle with new scenarios.
People drive into floods too. They just don't get sensational articles written about it, just posted on reddit.