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Comment by CaveTech | Hacker News Reader

I think you have it backwards. The radar will not initiate braking events for newly discovered stationary objects. Once it has human feedback from multiple sources, the object will be whitelisted and cause braking events.

blacklisting would cause the behaviour you describe.

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The blog post says "When the car is approaching an overhead highway road sign positioned on a rise in the road or a bridge where the road dips underneath, this often looks like a collision course. [...] If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist."

So as i read it, the system does think it will collide but ignore it if the whitelist says the object is safe.

The paragraph after that says basically once they have enough data, the system will start braking on unknown objects with gradually increasing force as the confidence level rises. So basically, it will brake on unknown traffic signs but only slightly, as the confidence level shouldn't get too high.

Basic problem: the system doesn't know where the road surface is. Google's vehicles, and most of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road vehicles, profiled terrain with a LIDAR. They know where the road surface is. This is essential to off-road operation, but on-road, optimistic assumptions (no big potholes, road not leading off cliff) can be used, at some risk.

What about a tractor trailer (like Florida) in the same spot as a white listed traffic sign?

Road signs will be more to the left or right, truck will be in front.

Corner case: truck jackknifed across the road immediately under a white listed gantry.

I read this as saying: we start braking lightly when detecting an unknown object, applying more braking force as it becomes clearer that this object is a collision risk.

Once enough human or autopilot trips detect the same signal with no collision, whitelist the signal and cease braking-and-monitoring behaviour.

I am probably misinterpreting but that is what makes sense to me.

I read it the same way as karyon. Whitelisting something means recognising it in a known-good way (in this case, "we know that's an overhead sign"), whereas blacklisting means known-bad.

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