Dolgov logs the road work incident in the computer. He explains that feedback from the driving teams is critical to the car's development. "Every disengage has

Dolgov logs the road work incident in the computer. He explains that feedback from the driving teams is critical to the car's development. "Every disengage has a severity associated with it," he says. "That was not the end of the world. We would have gotten through the cones. But it was a problem. Once we go back we'll pull the disk out of the car. We'll import the log from this run. This will get flagged to developers. It will go into our database of scenarios and test cases we track. We'll have more information about this on the desktops, but from what I saw on the screen it looks like we detected [the cones] correctly, but for some reason the planner was conservative and decided not to change lanes. We'll create a scenario that says, here, the right thing would have been to change lanes, and the next versions will have it addressed." Interesting that this is done so much in a scenario-by-scenario way. I would have thought something like this would be covered by a general rule, such as "choose an unobstructed path if one exists, otherwise stop". I suppose such general rules can conflict sometimes, and that's why you need the database of scenarios; but still, this case surprises me, since there was no reason the car couldn't simply change lanes. And I would think you would need the general rules because there will always be scenarios you couldn't have anticipated. Maybe the answer is that as long as you have the alert test driver, it's better for the car not to try to apply general rules; but once the car is truly autonomous with no driver, it shouldn't be quite so conservative, particularly in a situation like this where a danger-free solution existed.