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Weird scenarios that can't be predicted are important to consider. Waymo presentations like talking about a situation they ran into where the car needed to stop

Weird scenarios that can't be predicted are important to consider. Waymo presentations like talking about a situation they ran into where the car needed to stop because it encountered an old woman in a wheelchair with a broom chasing a turkey. As I understand it, most of these companies sensibly say "unknown weird thing in/near road means stop the car." ooo, there's video of the turkey wheelchair broom chase: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/google-waymo-self-driving-car-video-woman-bird https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/goo...

s73v3r_ 9y ago
A person pushing a bike is far, far from a "weird scenario", though.
- lojack 9y ago
  To a computer that’s never encountered this scenario before it might be.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    Then that is the fault of Uber for not exposing it to this extremely common scenario beforehand.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  It may depend if the test cars are used on routes with lots of homeless people or not, for the Mountain View test center I know of a handful of regularly seen homeless people on loaded bikes nearby in downtown Los Altos/Mountain View but it's not close to the level of San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland/Los Angeles/Anaheim/San Diego.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    A person pushing a bike is quite a common scenario, and it falls to the Uber engineers to account for it.
- skellera 9y ago
  She had a bunch of shopping bags hanging off the front. I imagine that could change how it was identified.
probably_wrong 9y ago
> As I understand it, most of these companies sensibly say "unknown weird thing in/near road means stop the car." That's not entirely true. A Tesla, for instance, won't stop if it detects a stationary object on the highway, assuming it's a false positives of the algorithm. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar
- zaarn 9y ago
  That sounds rather dangerous considering stationary objects do appear on highways from time to time.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

A person pushing a bike is far, far from a "weird scenario", though.

lojack 9y ago
To a computer that’s never encountered this scenario before it might be.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Then that is the fault of Uber for not exposing it to this extremely common scenario beforehand.
stevenwoo 9y ago
It may depend if the test cars are used on routes with lots of homeless people or not, for the Mountain View test center I know of a handful of regularly seen homeless people on loaded bikes nearby in downtown Los Altos/Mountain View but it's not close to the level of San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland/Los Angeles/Anaheim/San Diego.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  A person pushing a bike is quite a common scenario, and it falls to the Uber engineers to account for it.
skellera 9y ago
She had a bunch of shopping bags hanging off the front. I imagine that could change how it was identified.

probably_wrong 9y ago

> As I understand it, most of these companies sensibly say "unknown weird thing in/near road means stop the car." That's not entirely true. A Tesla, for instance, won't stop if it detects a stationary object on the highway, assuming it's a false positives of the algorithm. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar

zaarn 9y ago
That sounds rather dangerous considering stationary objects do appear on highways from time to time.