This on the same day Waymo cars seem to be roaming around entirely with nobody in or around them on public streets[1].
Waymo is testing its cars in a situation without any snow, rain, mostly without street parking, without pedestrians, in a city so hostile to pedestrians no one’s walking around.
99% of the work isn’t in getting the self driving to work in perfectly controlled sunshine conditions as Waymo has it working right now, 99% of the work is in getting all those edge cases working.
It’s gonna be decades before waymo cars can handle small mixed use streets with children playing on them, pedestrians, cyclists, and street vendors in a european city.
What they’re doing is amazing given the tech they have — but it’s not enough to reach actual level 5. It’s the same issue why most self-driving solutions only work on highways.
It’s gonna be decades before...
We can very accurately identify children, pedestrians, cyclists, and street vendors with machine vision. And with the LIDAR that Waymo is using, very accurately tell where they are and more importantly where they're going. Stopping for those things is pretty low on the "problems that need more work for Level 5" agenda.
You're very right that OD works great, that doesn't mean you can train a neural network to make the right decision though.
Find the path to where you want to go, avoid the parts with negative weights.
Again, the hard part is not "here is a human, avoid it". That part is done (in Waymo's case).
Imagine driving slowly through a large gathering of people, slowly having them move around your car, etc. Such situations will necessarily become major issues.
Especially if you imagine a snowy dense downtown street, with pedestrians crossing everywhere and snow all around you making the LIDAR useless.