Comment by voidUpdate
5 hours ago
> "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections"
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
I suddenly find that I really want an answer to this as well because I'm now imagining what might ensue if one of these attempted to board a car ferry. Typically there's a sign "turn headlights off", you're expected to maintain something like 5 mph (the flow of traffic should never stop), and you get directed by a human to cross multiple lane markings often deviating from the path that the vehicle immediately in front of you took.
I think that Waymo isn't concerned about those types of scenario because they only operate in a limited area, and can tune their systems to operate best in that area (EG not worrying about car ferries, human-operated parking lots etc)
Right. People still imagine that Level 5 is going to happen, and it is at best a long way off. You're talking full AI at some point.
Your scenario seems to have a lot of overlap with a construction worker directing traffic around a road construction site. I have no idea if Waymo is any good at navigating these, but I am sure there is a lot of model training around these scenarios because they are common in urban driving environments.
Don't they just have a stop/go board? Whereas an LEO at a crossing would have to use hand signals
This was found to be one of the early challenges of self driving: reading traffic signal gestures of traffic agents. It does it. But the jury is out if it does it well.
The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
Tesla fanboys gush about how FSD can understand LEO at irregular traffic conditions, but no company I’m aware of has confirmed their systems are capable.
> The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
They do follow hand signals from police. There are many videos documenting the behaviour. Here is one from waymo: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...
Look for the embed next to the text saying “The Waymo Driver recently interpreting a police officer’s hand signals in a Los Angeles intersection.”
Or here is a video observing the behaviour in the wild: https://youtu.be/3Qk_QhG5whw?si=GCBBNJqB22GRvxk1
Do you want confirmation about something more specific?
Teslas currently have a driver in the front who could take over in these situations.
Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?
Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to handle police directing traffic.