Waymo AI Driverless Car Goes Rogue: Blocks Traffic, Evades Capture | JJRicks Rides With Waymo #54

At 30:18 there's a very interesting tidbit. [VIDEO] They way I understand that is the route planner, which I assume is ran completely separately to the self-driving car, removes un-navigable spaces from the route planning. So in this situation, the roadside assistance driver is surprised that the entire lane has not been removed from the route planner. That's pretty damning and it makes me wonder if there is a huge gap in autonomy here that is being papered over by clever route planning (ie. avoid that lane altogether and the AI won't have to worry about the cones). The AI should be able to figure out on its own that the right lane was closed, it shouldn't need route planning to do that for it.

I had no idea it was available anywhere to just anyone, and without a backup driver in the driver seat. It still isn't to me in the UK, but really cool to see, it's a lot further along (especially in terms of regulation/being allowed) than I realised. Couple of articles deep from the submission, blogger taking one for a ride (alone, in the back seat) in Arizona: [VIDEO]

Yeah Cruise announced this Walmart delivery with self-driving cars in Nov 2020 to launch in 2021 [1] and it is now available at the first location in Arizona. Cruise has been testing here but probably more on proving grounds like Apple has. Apple just bought a proving ground this year that they have been leasing since 2017 [2]. Testing picking up as well as competition. I am sure Cruise will expand it in Arizona. Most of the self-driving operations are in the East Valley (Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe) as the roads are pretty simple and square. The Scottsdale area this is in also pretty simple and by the reservation. Self-driving cars are everywhere with Waymo in Arizona as well, many entirely unattended. If you drive anywhere you see them. For Waymo samples, this JJRicks Studios channel [3] did a series on it for a while to show rides with no driver. Waymo does have a team that follows cars in trouble, on the infamous "cone" one you can see it [4]. For the most part the operation is solid, very few incidents like the "cone" incident where the cone was just in between LiDAR and CV detection and probably caused a covering of the line that confused the decision process. These types of issues are best to resolve in a baseline test with little change before the more challenging ones. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]

IIRC correctly in their Waymo videos you can see inside the cabin. Each passenger gets a video feed of that video, so I think it is real-time. Let me find a link. EDIT: This was posted above for different reasons, but you can see the render is real-time. [VIDEO]

I must say, the linked video in the article to the rogue Waymo car is like a hilarious Black Mirror episode: [VIDEO]

[VIDEO] Here's a video of Waymo car in Phoenix. Around min. 17 it gets confused by a cone and stops in the middle of two lane road, hugging both lanes. Then google sends support but just when they arrive, the car drives away from them. They were lucky it didn't lead to an accident and as long as they keep the fleet to 600 cars then yeah, the accident rate will be much lower than Tesla's AutoPilot, shipped in more than a million cars. My point is not to rag on Waymo just to inject some reality. We don't have a choice between "safe and unsafe" way of developing self-driving software. We have a choice between "test software we know can't handle all situation on real roads and make it better based on that testing" or "we'll never have self-driving software". Except the other option will rather be: "U.S. doesn't allow testing of self-driving software on real roads and a Chinese company will develop it and will capture a trillion-dollar market in U.S."

It took a while, here's the video I watched that made me not want ANY Waymos near where I live: [VIDEO] I think the thing that made me so furiously mad is that there's all these situations in the video that people might laugh at, but there are situations where I've been stuck in traffic in an emergency and if I found out it's because Google was trying to make it's next pentillionth dollar I would blow my top. Can you imagine one of these during the Campfire evacuation?

You can easily find videos of waymo cars doing crazy stuff that stretches the definition of "working" pretty far. E.g., [VIDEO] Nobody has time for shenanigans like that.