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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

The original article from the SF Chronicle has some more info. Specifically, it contains the following very strange paragraph

Sources said that Waymo does not plan on operating its cars remotely — even in difficult situations — but it will remotely monitor them during tests. If one of the cars encounters something it doesn’t understand, such as complicated road construction, the car will contact Waymo for help recognizing the situation. After human testers give it feedback, the car will then decide how to navigate the situation.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Waymo...

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If one of the cars encounters something it doesn’t understand, such as complicated road construction, the car will contact Waymo for help recognizing the situation

Hopefully well in advance of actually hitting anything, but therein lies the problem: what does it do if it's moving at speed and figures out that it doesn't know what to do? If it continues moving, it might hit something, and if it tries to stop suddenly, it might get hit and cause a multi-car chain collision. Imagine you're following a car on a highway, in a situation where no other cars are around, a situation in which a human driver would practically never stop, and suddenly it brakes to a stop very rapidly because of some perturbation in the road that confuses it, but a human would have no trouble with. Drivers are taught to look beyond the car in front and try to anticipate what it might do; and something so contrary to expectations is going to lead to problems.

What do you do if you're driving along and realize you don't know what to do? Do you slam on the brakes for an emergency stop? Probably not. A safer choice is to remove throttle input and consider gently applying the brakes while you figure out what's going on, and check to see if there's enough space behind you to brake harder or to pull off to the side of the road.

I would expect a fully autonomous vehicle to constantly be planning for emergency and graceful stops, and to slow down if it doesn't have a confident plan for both types of stopping and forward progress. It should also have plans for when critical equipment fails, such as sensors or actuators as well as normal car systems like brakes, tires, engine, steering.

In my opinion, the safe thing to do is probably not to "stop very suddenly", but to "pull over and stop in a safe manner, and have the blinkers on".

I think it would also be possible to mitigate this problem by not driving on the freeway at all for the first iterations. (Feasible if you only drive within Mountain View, and not e.g. MV <-> SF.)

What do you find strange about this?

What is the difference between operating a car remotely and "giving it feedback"?

When someone ask you how to get somewhere, it's same difference as between giving directions and getting behind the wheel to drive them there.

I think car will still be in control, you just will tell it "drive slowly here, then here"

> What is the difference between operating a car remotely and "giving it feedback"?

The same as the difference between what a driver does and what a driving instructor sitting in the passenger seat does, only both remote...

It seems like the round trip time for that type of operation would be pretty challenging for situations where you have, for example, six seconds to avoid crashing into a road barrier..

This is not video game style remote driving. The car is always in control, and its primitive object avoidance routines won't let it crash into a barrier. This is presumably to allow humans to help make higher-level decisions. For example, maybe the car asks something like "this road is blocked. I could cross the double yellow line to get around, or I could reverse and go a different way. Both of these options are suboptimal, can you help me choose?"

The most extreme type of assistance could maybe be a human drawing or modifying the vehicle's planned path (if you watch any of the Waymo example videos, you'll see the immediate path that the vehicle is planning to take). But even in this scenario, the car is still responsible for navigating that path and avoiding any obstacles.

> The car is always in control, and its primitive object avoidance routines won't let it crash into a barrier.The car is always in control, and its primitive object avoidance routines won't let it crash into a barrier.

Of course, how inconceivable that a self driving car could crash into a static barrier!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I

While I agree, yes it has been proven with Tesla's technology that it could happen, I believe that Waymo would not be so callous as to apply for this permit if it had not 100% proven that its technology would not do something as blatantly bad as that. I could be wrong, but I certainly feel through their various reports and showcases that they have by far and away the best grasp on fully autonomous vehicles. I have yet to read that in their millions of miles of fully autonomous driving there was a crash that was worse than cosmetic damage to either vehicle or caused injury [1]. They also seem ready to take responsibility for any of their mistakes and use them as a learning experience to further improve their technology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Crashes

> I believe that Waymo would not be so callous as to apply for this permit if it had not 100% proven that its technology would not do something as blatantly bad as that.

It it could prove this 100% to itself, it should be able to prove it to the general public and the authorities in a test environment..

That's not a self driving car. Autopilot is L1 or L2 at best, vs. Waymo's L4. There's a huge gap between the two.

I don't think it's for that kind of situation. It's probably more for, like, a weird construction setup where the car needs to be told when it's okay to cross over the normal lines painted on the ground, or a parking garage where the car has to be told where it's okay to park (e.g. different sections may have different rules).

What if for 8 hours a day your job was to avoid crashes in remote vehicles... every 6 seconds your monitor changes feed to a near accident and you have to react, your decision saves the vehicle and passengers or there is a crash.. next.. next..

thanks for next season black mirror spoilers dude

I’m not sure throwing control to a remote human in this situation would be much better given that they’d need to be able to immediately act correctly. I guess they’re confident about their abilities at speed. I would guess this is probably more to address “there’s an ambulance parked in the intersection, can I go around it or should I turn around and find another way” type questions

If I had to guess I think it will probably stop and wait for the remote assistance.

Can that happen? You can come to a stop within 2-3 seconds.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1897/

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