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Comment by voidUpdate

4 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?

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

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.

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.