Waymo told the Chronicle in a statement that the robotaxi “detected that there may be a risk of a person within that crowd who had fallen down, and decided to carefully initiate a passing maneuver when the opposing lane was clear to move around what could be an obstacle and a safety concern.”
“After starting that maneuver, out of an abundance of caution around these vulnerable road users, and to avoid getting too close or cutting them off, the Waymo remained in the oncoming lane for longer than necessary before returning to its original lane of travel,” the company said.
This has to be one of the most scifi videos I have ever seen... The lights, the people on uniwheels, the self-driving car that misbehaves followed by people on unicycles surrounding the car to coax it back to the correct lane...
This is kind of cute, in a dystopian way.
"Waymo you're going the wrong way!" and the human uni-cyclist steers in front of Waymo, knowing that it will brake, in an attempt to force it back into the correct lane.
One really basic & important feature of (decent) autonomous systems might be called Situation Sanity Awareness. Human drivers are (overall) extremely good at that. And a car driving for any distance on the wrong side of a double yellow line is a very obvious SSA fail.
When are we going to admit that the current level of understanding and technical capabilities are not sufficient for safe autonomous driving?
Google's AI is just as bad as the rest. I remember when it couldn't get past a traffic cone after not being in an accident for "countless hours":
https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public and putting people in danger. Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's capabilities, same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.
And now this great AI company is also providing AI services to pariah states like Apartheid Israel to be used on people. That's scary.
Self driving is a very difficult (and expensive to develop) engineering challenge.. I think it might end up being cheaper (and thus more likely) that the "solution" will be a legal one rather than an engineering one: Self driving vehicles will have a light and/or klaxon on them, if you see or hear it, it will be your responsibility to get out of it's way.
Thats how the issues with automobiles vs other road users was resolved in the 1920's. The impetus is there, corporations want more and more robots for everything.
Its obviously in the wrong but I do wonder if it somehow misidentified the lane it was supposed to be in as a bike lane?
I now expect a new recaptcha challenge to be added by Google, identifying unicycles. We already have bicycles and mopeds, but it would appear that unicycles confuse their cars.
Sabotaging such a obvious dangerously vehicle could be seen as self defense?=
No idea what the Waymo car was thinking, but what are these kids riding?
Maybe it thought they were on a bike lane? Where I'm from it's illegal to ride like that in a group outside of police-sanctioned events - you're supposed to ride one after the other and keep right.
I suspect this is human error rather than a computer error. Waymo is a supervised system -- from what I've heard while there's little remote driving by humans, there is occasional real-time human labelling and confirmation. So the car likely phoned home to ask "what the heck is this?", and a human clicked on the "overtake" button or something.
I would be curious to know what the car thought the situation was, something must have gone really wrong here. It ignored the double lines and crossed them to overtake and then stayed in the wrong lane for a really long time.
If the car understood the state of the world around this, this is kind of a huge mistake in behaviour. And if it didn't it is concerning as well as it would mean it can end up in the opposite lane without knowing it. I would suspect maybe a bit of both, that it misunderstood the world when it started to overtake, and then was unable to abort the process safely. In that case I probably would have expected it to stop driving forwards and put on hazard warning lights as long as it is in the wrong lane.