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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This goes out the window as soon as someone places a single traffic cone on the roadway. Lanes are not a fixed property of the road.

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This was last year, but I live off of San Antonio Road and the one day that the Los Altos municipal maintenance staff placed the cones on the median instead of in the lane (I think in prep for the workers to trim the plants in the median), a Waymo self driving car in front of me stopped immediately upon encountering the coned region - there were no cars in front of it or pedestrians or workers within sight and we were going probably 35mph. I'm sure they changed the programming/data for that situation but there are several erosion drop offs on highway one along the coast that are coned off in unique ways, and everyone in a car is going by at 55-75 mph.

Yes, because Waymo doesn't require special detectable hardware as proposed by GP. And this is exactly the argument the parent tried to make: Your self driving car needs to react to unpredicted changes in the environment. Sensing/visual information (incl LIDAR) thus seems unavoidable to achieve safe self driving. But getting to that point and not having your tesla drive into a wall or your uber into a pedestrian seems like the hard part and from there it is probably not that hard to reach level 4 / 5. Safety is pretty much all we are complaining about in those threads, after all.

I was trying to be supportive of GP with an example but did not say that explicitly.

That means they would need to use new cones with transponders. Yes, it's more expensive, but also way more reliable.

The detection of the cones isn't the problem. The software properly identified that there were cones near the roadway, that's why it stopped. The really hard problem is programming decision-making logic that will properly ignore cones that aren't in the roadway, 100 times out of 100.

I used to do QA for the Waymo cars, and boy do they get worked into a tizzy if there's any kind of construction going on. It was the most common situation for remote assistance (read: people sitting in a room sending pathfinding suggestions) to get involved.

Judging from some of these comments, the problem is still very difficult.

So when a police officer puts down a cone behind a broken down car in the freeway--??

The cone that transmits to every vehicle within listening range: "don't hit me"?

Stealing that transponder code would be hilarious - place invisible virtual cones wherever you like!

(Seriously, cones really ought to be dealt with by image recognition? Easiest possible case, an object specifically designed to be seen?)

I can see the 007 getaway now. With a press of the button, a bunch of tiny transponders are thrown on the road. The bad guy's cars automatically brake because they can't find a way to get around the new obstacles.

Another press of the button dispenses a martini.

And when all the cones' fancy electronics break or aren't charged? Is the cop just supposed to not stop? What about poorer jurisdictions that can't afford it?

And if the officer puts down a regular cone and the driver is texting and doesn't see it? Like, yes this would require changes to how we do things. Police officers will have to be careful to use the new style cones correctly. Is this any different than when they first started having use cones/flares? There is a price for every technology. I mean one of the alternatives is that we rely on the LIDAR being so good as to not hit the car and the officer standing next to it because it recognizes that situation. Which it will. Most of the time. Until it doesn't. Seems to be that having the transceiver and LIDAR backup is better than fancy expensive LIDAR.

What if it's just a regular cone, like lots of people carry in their trunk?

And less likely to be stolen when the cones can be tracked.

Not just any transponders: transponders that never fail or run out of battery juice, and are never subject to RF interference from anything.

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