Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo issues software and mapping recall after robotaxi crashes into a pole

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 43 posts

Re: Waymo issues software and mapping recall after robotaxi crashes into a pole

#2

Post by bastawhiz »

This is the most interesting part, in my opinion:

> Waymo’s recall was deployed by the company’s engineers at the central depot where the vehicles return for regular maintenance and testing. It was not through an over-the-air software update, like some of Tesla’s recent recalls.

I'd be interested to learn more about why the updates are manual, and also whether the map data is fully local to the vehicle. Tesla obviously does the polar opposite of this, and it seems to have at least some degree of success, but Tesla's approach has always seemed like it would be subject to some bad potential failure modes in my mind.

How much data does this amount to? Gigs? Terabytes?

On the same note, I'm curious about what data gets pulled from the map versus sensor data. The car seems to have used map data instead of sensor data (unless I'm misunderstanding?). Whether there's a curb seems to be exactly the sort of thing you could rely on sensors for, mostly because you also already need to look for obstructions which necessarily can't be in map data.

Re: Waymo issues software and mapping recall after robotaxi crashes into a pole

#4

Post by unshavedyak »

bastawhiz wrote: post #2

This is the most interesting part, in my opinion: > Waymo’s recall was deployed by the company’s engineers at the central depot where the vehicles return for regular maintenance and testing. It was not through an over-the-air software update, like some of Tesla’s recent recalls. I'd be interested to learn more about why the updates are manual, and also whether the map data is fully local to the vehicle. Tesla obvious…

Maybe it's about validation, not necessarily update data. They do seem to take safety more serious than Tesla does.

Re: Waymo issues software and mapping recall after robotaxi crashes into a pole

#6

Post by xnx »

bastawhiz wrote: post #2

This is the most interesting part, in my opinion: > Waymo’s recall was deployed by the company’s engineers at the central depot where the vehicles return for regular maintenance and testing. It was not through an over-the-air software update, like some of Tesla’s recent recalls. I'd be interested to learn more about why the updates are manual, and also whether the map data is fully local to the vehicle. Tesla obvious…

It's a shame there are so many trade secrets involved, because it would be especially fascinating to get more details on their entire system everything from advanced topics like how they blend ML with traditional rule-based logic to how they manage data like maps (versioning, distributed updates, etc.)

Re: Waymo issues software and mapping recall after robotaxi crashes into a pole

#9

Post by ra7 »

xnx wrote: post #6
bastawhiz wrote: post #2

This is the most interesting part, in my opinion: > Waymo’s recall was deployed by the company’s engineers at the central depot where the vehicles return for regular maintenance and testing. It was not through an over-the-air software update, like some of Tesla’s recent recalls. I'd be interested to learn more about why the updates are manual, and also whether the map data is fully local to the vehicle. Tesla obvious…

It's a shame there are so many trade secrets involved, because it would be especially fascinating to get more details on their entire system everything from advanced topics like how they blend ML with traditional rule-based logic to how they manage data like maps (versioning, distributed updates, etc.)

Agreed. They publish some impressive research on https://waymo.com/research/, but are very tight-lipped about many things. I've always wanted to know how they maintain maps and what their in-vehicle compute hardware looks like. They don't want to share anything beyond high level blog posts.
Post reply on HN