Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

Post by roxgib » Mon, Feb 19, 2024, 11:33 AM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #51

nicbou wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the cars were recalled, a team will study what happened, the problem will get fixed, simulations and tests will be created. When I make a dumb mistake, the other drivers rarely learn from it.

So in future your self driving car might be recalled at any random time because a new corner case from an infinity was found. If the car can't be driven by a human all owners of thsi cars will be stuck wherever they were at that moment.

This will be interesting to watch. If I bought an autonomous car and the autonomous mode was disabled for a few days or even weeks while a bug was fixed I can always fall back to driving it myself. If that's not possible (maybe because the car doesn't support it or I didn't have a licence or human drivers had been banned) and suddenly it's a whole different situation. Of course owning a car might become less common in itself, if you're just taking them like an Uber you can always switch to a different company.

Post by Out_of_Characte » Tue, Feb 20, 2024, 12:37 AM UTC

awhitby wrote: post #40

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brakes respond immediatly,for all intents and purposes as a human with a reaction time. I'm at fault if the person in front of me stops and I dont have the stopping distance to avoid a collision. I get that self driving software is difficult. But theres no excuse for this type of accident.

That might be true for the simple case of following within a lane, although you only have to drive around to realize most drivers do not leave adequate following distance at all times to make this a pure physics problem. And neither is a good driver watching only the car in front, but also the brake lights of the cars in front of that, to help anticipate the car in front's likely actions. But take an even slightly mo…

A car changing lanes does indeed remove stopping distance. But thats also something human drivers are naturally more capable of understanding than waymo. It shouldn't have mattered where a vehicle is on the road. Any human is able to predict if a weirdly loaded vehicle making a turn has a chance of invading their lane and/or stopping distance. Its a complex problem for sure but that also shows that you need absolute proof that the software is able to generalise the problem. Especially if you want self driving cars to respect flow of traffic over stopping distance.

Even if your software is as good as it can be, I doubt you'll be able to get them to recognise how to resolve deadlocks. Which would also involve severe hindrance to emergency vehicles.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck