Comment by wombat-man
14 hours ago
If they have a laser measurement of the road from before, couldn't they see that the level of water vs the expected road surface?
14 hours ago
If they have a laser measurement of the road from before, couldn't they see that the level of water vs the expected road surface?
Such detailed database of fine grained road geometry gets stale very quickly, due to road maintenance and road construction. In US highway lanes are shifted sideways frequently.
But are they not continuously updating the road database with their fleet?
For common routes, yes. For getting to John's house, where the path there sometimes floods, no.
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Earthquake or sinkhole?
I traveled to Austin 3 weeks ago and there were entire highways not on Google Maps.
Apparently they were built in just a few months.
There's some places where Apple still thinks I'm driving through a cornfield even though the development is a few years old, now.
I suppose I could inform them somehow, but it's not worth the bother.
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Pretty sure they already rely on such a database for positioning, so they already have that problem.
But yes, this wouldn't work for other self-driving systems that don't rely on HD maps.
That seems a very risky assumption for any car (self driving or human driver) during flash floods. "Turn around don't drown":
You think you know how deep it is under because you've taken that road many times before (or in your case you have historical laser measurement)
But you don't know:
- Maybe the road under fully collapsed
- Maybe the flow of water is extremely strong, so you need to accurately estimate that too.
I more meant that it could maybe see a significant difference in the road, and know to take caution, not to try to gauge the depth of a submerged roadway.
Flow should be able to be done with vision, radar can as well: some bridges use surface flow monitoring radar.
You underestimate how frequently details like this change in the real world and how difficult it is to reliably integrate them into the mapping models with very low error rates.
Aggregating this data in something close to real-time, verifying and corroborating that the change to the road model is real and correct, and then pushing those model updates to every vehicle that may need it almost immediately is not really a solved problem.
That's so much extra complexity
If they have a pre-existing database of every road, sure. And if it's kept up-to-date at all times in all vehicles.
Waymo does have a database of every today they drive, but for this they don't need one.
If the car comes to a road covered with water, and that road is in the database, and the water level appears low compared to the historical level of the road in the DB, then the car could cross. if the road is not in the DB, then a different decision might be made.
This is similar to humans: you might make different decisions depending on whether you know the road well or not.
Isn’t that the Waymo data model, though? They extensively pre-drive every new market, building dense volumetric maps of the entire service area before they begin service, so they essentially do have that database of every road (that they drive on).
Granted, I am not sure exactly how Waymo operates, but I thought that the extensive testing was mostly for legal reasons+just handling edge cases.
I am saying this, because I noticed that they typically start with a low-tier restrictive permit to operate (with a rather small number of cars in the fleet). Then they run it for a year or two, iron out edge cases particular to a given city (e.g., climate particularities, crazy spaghetti junctions in ATL, etc.), and log a lot of data. Then they take that data, go to the city/state, say "we have all this data that demonstrates we were very above the board while running the test pilot program, we are safe, and now we want to expand out of a very limited test pilot program."
And then it either goes well (Bay Area, LA, etc.) or goes off the rails for other reasons (often failing earlier for entirely unexpected reasons, like the pushback against it from taxi driver unions in NYC).
My point being, I could be entirely wrong, but I don't think that they literally map every single inch of the road before being allowed to operate. I just don't see it as being possible in any large populated city, given how often things change there. Just in 3 years living at one apartment in Seattle, I had a road directly adjacent to me changed from 2-way to 1-way, and then had 3-4 lanes that were basically highway entrances/exits (a block away from me) created and the whole area being rerouted entirely.
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