11 ms·

What happens if these cars get in a situation where there is no legal way to move? For instance, the other day I was driving down the street and it was closed

What happens if these cars get in a situation where there is no legal way to move? For instance, the other day I was driving down the street and it was closed because of a Farmers market. Will they just sit there for hours? In gridlock, there is often no way to move without "blocking the box."

stale2002 9y ago
Probably alert Google HQ, who will then send a human to pick it up in 10 minutes? Or any number of other solutions, as I easily thought up that one in 5 seconds?
- rayiner 9y ago
  In New York, they sometimes block all of Lexington Ave. (a major north-south throughfare) at Midtown for pedestrian activities. What happens when a hundred self-driving cars all get to Lex and stop because they can't pass?
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    After one or two get backed up, they alert the others that traffic is stopped and to go another way? In general the answer to all of these whacky what ifs is "whatever a human driver, or group would do, but with more efficient communication".
    - rayiner 9y ago
      These aren't "wacky what ifs." I don't know what things are like in the Valley, but here on the east coast something unexpected changes my commuting route a couple of times a month (multiply that by tens of thousands of drivers). "Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.
      - joshuamorton 9y ago
        >"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases. Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data. So yeah, they'd work the exact same way that I commuted on the east coast (which is the same way I commute in SV): the maps application had traffic information updates faster than the radio. The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient.
        Bartweiss 9y ago
        > Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data. Sure, but Maps did try to send me the wrong way down a one way street last week, and through a closed tunnel last night. It's excellent technology, I don't mean to mock, but it's not perfect - situational info is going to have to override map info. I think the question is less whether self-driving systems will ever be right and more what they'll do when they (like humans) are inevitably wrong. Driving in major cities often means breaking normal traffic laws because construction, police guidance, or some other circumstance means there is no legal way to progress. That's the sort of problem that puts L5 vastly further out than this. What does your car do when a traffic cop waves it through a red light, or someone rear-ends it and needs to meet you at a crash reporting zone half a mile down the highway?
        rayiner 9y ago
        > The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient. I don't really buy that. Google Maps regularly gets confused in D.C. due to changes in traffic patterns. And Apple Maps once tried to send me down a highway on-ramp that had been closed for several weeks. They also get confused at the beginning/end of trips ("proceed to the route"). I don't even try to catch Ubers from downtown D.C. anymore because mapping applications can't reliably get drivers to a pickup point without spending several minutes coordinating with the driver over the phone.
Fricken 9y ago
Waymo and Cruise automation are building out call centres, where remote human monitors will be available to help out the vehicles when they get hung-up. The monitors won't be able to make safety-critical interventions, but they'll be able to give the cars and passengers instructions, kind of like a backseat driver, I guess. So if there's an accident scene, for example, the human monitor will judge whether to stop and wait, navigate a path through, or turn around and find a detour.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! They are merely remote-control cars with adaptive cruise and lane assist. So it's somewhere between a Lyft and remote surgery. What happens if the car loses internet?
  - Fricken 9y ago
    No, they're not remote control. The human operators can't make safety-critical interventions, they won't be able to drive a robotaxi 50 mph into a tree, for example. There's an inherent liability associated with that.
  - verletx64 9y ago
    > Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! ? Do you class a self driving vehicle as one without any manual controls whatsoever? In which case, you're going to be waiting a long time for your version of it, and not for tech reasons.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I think the implication is that those call centers will be used less than 1% of the time.
- jamesjyu 9y ago
  Upcoming Uber advertisement: "You don't even need a car! Work from home and drive from your mobile phone."
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
From what I read recently, they're going to have basically a call center the car will connect to for an operator to drive it remotely.
- koolba 9y ago
  Cell service dead zones aside, is the latency and jitter for remote operation over a wireless link low enough to be feasible?
  - agildehaus 9y ago
    I would assume the call center would be able to provide instructions for a non-legal move to the car's planner. The car would do the rest.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I think this whole thing is hilariously premature for a bunch of other reasons, but I assume a remote piloted car is gonna go REALLY slow until the car is confident again, and Google's cars are ridiculously limited in their geographic area. My guess is that they have sent a Verizon guy ("Can you hear me now? Good.") down each and every road they whitelist the cars to drive on.
    - nraynaud 9y ago
      a lot of people drive with van full of networking gear, telco companies checking their coverage maps, telco companies checking the competition maps, regulators checking coverage, consumer magazines checking coverage maps, regulators checking something else but seeing the coverage while doing it, mapping cars, etc. my points are 1) running the roads scouring for GSM and wifi networks is nothing out of the ordinary 2) they would probably not even have to create a mission for that, and use or piggyback something else.
    - njarboe 9y ago
      This is a major reason for Google street view cars going everywhere, I would guess. Letting people look at street view in google maps is not the reason they have and continue to spend millions (billions?) on creating these detailed maps. Sort of like when Google had a free info phone service for a while to train their voice recognition system. I would not be surprised if street view goes away at some point.
eggpy 9y ago
Presumably Waymo has this traffic data by leveraging existing Android monitoring technology and can reroute accordingly. If you've ever used Google Maps for directions and come up to an accident or something you know it will suggest a better route as it becomes available. These cars will likely not get themselves into high-congestion areas with no way out simply because they already know about the high congestion area and reroute accordingly
- juliesulti 9y ago
  There are anecdotes of Google Maps causing traffic, routing people to dead ends, etc. There was the incident where Google Maps routed a lot of interstate drivers down a dirt road serving a prison. Last week in Oakland, Google routed drivers away from traffic on I-880, onto Embarcadero where the bridge is closed for construction. Last week, Google refused to route me over the open, clear Sonora Pass between Modesto and Bridgeport, giving me instead a 2.5-hour detour via US-50 to South Lake Tahoe. I'm sure this Waymo project does not take the perfection of Google Maps data as a given.
  - eggpy 9y ago
    I wasn't aware of these, but with anecdotes like these then it makes perfect sense to have available remote human overrides! I don't mean to insinuate that maps is perfect, just that the number of times the cars will find themselves in this specific situation is probably minimal.
    - mantas 9y ago
      Eh, in my whereabouts Google Maps routinely suggest "shortcuts" on shitty dirt roads instead of 10km "detour" on a perfect tarmac road. And use 70km/h (speed limit for dirt roads) to guesstimate duration for the shortcut. It got to a point that I'm double-checking their suggestions via sat photos or other routing services.
    - dx034 9y ago
      Also local human overrides. I as a passenger want to determine the route to take. Maybe I just don't like the recommended route, maybe I know that it won't work. There's no reason why the passenger shouldn't be able to determine the route.
agildehaus 9y ago
Waymo has an operations center the car is in contact with. I would assume the car would call out to this operations center for human-provided instructions. And you'd be the only car to experience it, since all other cars would be notified and take an alternate route. Part of getting this out into the world is finding good answers to these questions.
DamnInteresting 9y ago
Everybody else is suggesting remote human intervention from an operations center, but those would likely suffer from hold times and dead zones. What if, as an additional option, a touchscreen in the car highlighted the car's planned route, and the humans inside could drag the line to reroute, and/or add waypoints to the route? This would get around most farmer's markets and road closures. And/or they could tap to indicate a semi-permanent obstruction, and the car would do the rerouting.
gniv 9y ago
I doubt that they only make legal maneuvers. They could still get stuck for various reasons, but legal restrictions are probably not a main concern.

stale2002 9y ago

Probably alert Google HQ, who will then send a human to pick it up in 10 minutes? Or any number of other solutions, as I easily thought up that one in 5 seconds?

rayiner 9y ago
In New York, they sometimes block all of Lexington Ave. (a major north-south throughfare) at Midtown for pedestrian activities. What happens when a hundred self-driving cars all get to Lex and stop because they can't pass?
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  After one or two get backed up, they alert the others that traffic is stopped and to go another way? In general the answer to all of these whacky what ifs is "whatever a human driver, or group would do, but with more efficient communication".
  - rayiner 9y ago
    These aren't "wacky what ifs." I don't know what things are like in the Valley, but here on the east coast something unexpected changes my commuting route a couple of times a month (multiply that by tens of thousands of drivers). "Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      >"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases. Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data. So yeah, they'd work the exact same way that I commuted on the east coast (which is the same way I commute in SV): the maps application had traffic information updates faster than the radio. The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient.
      - Bartweiss 9y ago
        > Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data. Sure, but Maps did try to send me the wrong way down a one way street last week, and through a closed tunnel last night. It's excellent technology, I don't mean to mock, but it's not perfect - situational info is going to have to override map info. I think the question is less whether self-driving systems will ever be right and more what they'll do when they (like humans) are inevitably wrong. Driving in major cities often means breaking normal traffic laws because construction, police guidance, or some other circumstance means there is no legal way to progress. That's the sort of problem that puts L5 vastly further out than this. What does your car do when a traffic cop waves it through a red light, or someone rear-ends it and needs to meet you at a crash reporting zone half a mile down the highway?
      - rayiner 9y ago
        > The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient. I don't really buy that. Google Maps regularly gets confused in D.C. due to changes in traffic patterns. And Apple Maps once tried to send me down a highway on-ramp that had been closed for several weeks. They also get confused at the beginning/end of trips ("proceed to the route"). I don't even try to catch Ubers from downtown D.C. anymore because mapping applications can't reliably get drivers to a pickup point without spending several minutes coordinating with the driver over the phone.

Fricken 9y ago

Waymo and Cruise automation are building out call centres, where remote human monitors will be available to help out the vehicles when they get hung-up. The monitors won't be able to make safety-critical interventions, but they'll be able to give the cars and passengers instructions, kind of like a backseat driver, I guess. So if there's an accident scene, for example, the human monitor will judge whether to stop and wait, navigate a path through, or turn around and find a detour.

stephengillie 9y ago
Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! They are merely remote-control cars with adaptive cruise and lane assist. So it's somewhere between a Lyft and remote surgery. What happens if the car loses internet?
- Fricken 9y ago
  No, they're not remote control. The human operators can't make safety-critical interventions, they won't be able to drive a robotaxi 50 mph into a tree, for example. There's an inherent liability associated with that.
- verletx64 9y ago
  > Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! ? Do you class a self driving vehicle as one without any manual controls whatsoever? In which case, you're going to be waiting a long time for your version of it, and not for tech reasons.
- komali2 9y ago
  I think the implication is that those call centers will be used less than 1% of the time.
jamesjyu 9y ago
Upcoming Uber advertisement: "You don't even need a car! Work from home and drive from your mobile phone."

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

From what I read recently, they're going to have basically a call center the car will connect to for an operator to drive it remotely.

koolba 9y ago
Cell service dead zones aside, is the latency and jitter for remote operation over a wireless link low enough to be feasible?
- agildehaus 9y ago
  I would assume the call center would be able to provide instructions for a non-legal move to the car's planner. The car would do the rest.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I think this whole thing is hilariously premature for a bunch of other reasons, but I assume a remote piloted car is gonna go REALLY slow until the car is confident again, and Google's cars are ridiculously limited in their geographic area. My guess is that they have sent a Verizon guy ("Can you hear me now? Good.") down each and every road they whitelist the cars to drive on.
  - nraynaud 9y ago
    a lot of people drive with van full of networking gear, telco companies checking their coverage maps, telco companies checking the competition maps, regulators checking coverage, consumer magazines checking coverage maps, regulators checking something else but seeing the coverage while doing it, mapping cars, etc. my points are 1) running the roads scouring for GSM and wifi networks is nothing out of the ordinary 2) they would probably not even have to create a mission for that, and use or piggyback something else.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    This is a major reason for Google street view cars going everywhere, I would guess. Letting people look at street view in google maps is not the reason they have and continue to spend millions (billions?) on creating these detailed maps. Sort of like when Google had a free info phone service for a while to train their voice recognition system. I would not be surprised if street view goes away at some point.

eggpy 9y ago

Presumably Waymo has this traffic data by leveraging existing Android monitoring technology and can reroute accordingly. If you've ever used Google Maps for directions and come up to an accident or something you know it will suggest a better route as it becomes available. These cars will likely not get themselves into high-congestion areas with no way out simply because they already know about the high congestion area and reroute accordingly

juliesulti 9y ago
There are anecdotes of Google Maps causing traffic, routing people to dead ends, etc. There was the incident where Google Maps routed a lot of interstate drivers down a dirt road serving a prison. Last week in Oakland, Google routed drivers away from traffic on I-880, onto Embarcadero where the bridge is closed for construction. Last week, Google refused to route me over the open, clear Sonora Pass between Modesto and Bridgeport, giving me instead a 2.5-hour detour via US-50 to South Lake Tahoe. I'm sure this Waymo project does not take the perfection of Google Maps data as a given.
- eggpy 9y ago
  I wasn't aware of these, but with anecdotes like these then it makes perfect sense to have available remote human overrides! I don't mean to insinuate that maps is perfect, just that the number of times the cars will find themselves in this specific situation is probably minimal.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Eh, in my whereabouts Google Maps routinely suggest "shortcuts" on shitty dirt roads instead of 10km "detour" on a perfect tarmac road. And use 70km/h (speed limit for dirt roads) to guesstimate duration for the shortcut. It got to a point that I'm double-checking their suggestions via sat photos or other routing services.
  - dx034 9y ago
    Also local human overrides. I as a passenger want to determine the route to take. Maybe I just don't like the recommended route, maybe I know that it won't work. There's no reason why the passenger shouldn't be able to determine the route.

agildehaus 9y ago

Waymo has an operations center the car is in contact with. I would assume the car would call out to this operations center for human-provided instructions. And you'd be the only car to experience it, since all other cars would be notified and take an alternate route. Part of getting this out into the world is finding good answers to these questions.

DamnInteresting 9y ago

Everybody else is suggesting remote human intervention from an operations center, but those would likely suffer from hold times and dead zones. What if, as an additional option, a touchscreen in the car highlighted the car's planned route, and the humans inside could drag the line to reroute, and/or add waypoints to the route? This would get around most farmer's markets and road closures. And/or they could tap to indicate a semi-permanent obstruction, and the car would do the rerouting.

gniv 9y ago

I doubt that they only make legal maneuvers. They could still get stuck for various reasons, but legal restrictions are probably not a main concern.