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"Every city has different driving culture, so how will autonomous cars treat these unique conditions. What’s safe in Bangalore may cause a traffic collapse in B

"Every city has different driving culture, so how will autonomous cars treat these unique conditions. What’s safe in Bangalore may cause a traffic collapse in Boston, etc." This will be a really interesting problem to solve. The ability to turn on a red light for example will require a city specific profile and will change over time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red

wrsh07 10y ago
Honestly, I think these special cases for robust systems like Waymo's will be more a matter of custom configuration than something particularly novel. Yes, they'll run into scaling to every city immediately, but that happens already with software-only technology.
- protomok 10y ago
  I think it's the combination of mandatory updates and zero tolerance for error that will be interesting. For example city X decides to change some traffic rule on date Y. Each autonomous vehicle will need to receive an update by date Y. What happens if a vehicle hasn't been updated soon enough? One solution is a mandatory update scheme. Every day a vehicle checks if it has received its daily update, if not the vehicle is disabled. Another more long term solution could be close co-ordination with cities to determine which upcoming traffic rule changes warrant mandatory (vehicle cannot be enabled without update) updates. These corner cases may seem trivial, but with zero tolerance for error across hundreds of thousands of cities careful strategies will need to be developed.
  - wrsh07 10y ago
    We might also have inter-car communication which could make this easier. [eg you don't have to worry about one car's sensors failing as long as it can still hear from other cars] I'm curious about what corner cases exist that eg Google hasn't seen in millions of miles driving in a city. [I'm sure there are some, I just don't have a good imagination. Nor can I really fathom what a million miles of city driving is like]

wrsh07 10y ago

Honestly, I think these special cases for robust systems like Waymo's will be more a matter of custom configuration than something particularly novel. Yes, they'll run into scaling to every city immediately, but that happens already with software-only technology.

protomok 10y ago
I think it's the combination of mandatory updates and zero tolerance for error that will be interesting. For example city X decides to change some traffic rule on date Y. Each autonomous vehicle will need to receive an update by date Y. What happens if a vehicle hasn't been updated soon enough? One solution is a mandatory update scheme. Every day a vehicle checks if it has received its daily update, if not the vehicle is disabled. Another more long term solution could be close co-ordination with cities to determine which upcoming traffic rule changes warrant mandatory (vehicle cannot be enabled without update) updates. These corner cases may seem trivial, but with zero tolerance for error across hundreds of thousands of cities careful strategies will need to be developed.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  We might also have inter-car communication which could make this easier. [eg you don't have to worry about one car's sensors failing as long as it can still hear from other cars] I'm curious about what corner cases exist that eg Google hasn't seen in millions of miles driving in a city. [I'm sure there are some, I just don't have a good imagination. Nor can I really fathom what a million miles of city driving is like]