how does it know where to be in the lane if it doesn't use lane markings?
"stick to the right as far as possible" is not a reliable approach when the emergency lane may or may not be there.
"stick to the right as far as possible" is not a reliable approach when the emergency lane may or may not be there.
The case I was thinking of is a highway I was in last week, where temporary work has one of the directions going through the other direction, so the 2+emergency lanes in one direction become 2 lanes without emergency in one direction and one lane in the opposite one.
In this case, there are temporary lane markings on the ground indicating you should not follow the old ones, but rather align yourself further to the right then you would normally do.
OTOH, I am familiar with the situation in Rome where often the lane markings are deleted and a road may be 2-3-4 lanes depending on how people queue up, in which case people would generally rely on social/experience cues, which I'm unable to formalize.
If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."
As part of that localization, there will be a metric of how good the local solution is vs. the map. If a divider moves, for example, the data will be inconsistent with the map, and the software will know that something is amiss, without having to intelligently classify anything. The software can drive confidently when in a consistent environment, and drive conservatively when in an inconsistent environment.
Generally, any object that isn't in the map will stand out obviously. That's where having stuff like cameras becomes useful. Asking a computer, "is there a construction worker in this 20MP image of a street?" is hard, but asking a computer, "is this 0.1MP human sized blob a construction worker?" is a lot easier. Waymo has been responding intelligently to bicyclist hand signals for years. "Is this sign shaped blob a construction sign?" is even easier.
The lidar and mapping is a key difference between Waymo and Tesla. Waymo works because they have the big data infrastructure, and the budget to deck out every car with orders of magnitude more sensors and compute.
But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible construction area to give a human a minute or so to take over.
They just don't address use cases where people aren't able to drive at all. Which are interesting to a lot of people but they may just not happen for a long time.
There are people who just want cheaper Ubers but there are others who are fine with handing off long boring sections of highway driving.