Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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Aside from the other comments, pulling over when you detect a collision is definitely not best human practice on an ordinary city street for a human driver. If you detect a collision, you stop the vehicle, access the situation and maybe pull over based on your assessment of the situation.

And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system guiding a self-driving is some combination of trained neural-network routines and more standard robotic feedback loops. But "what to do after a collision" seems like one of those corner cases that neither programming approach would or could deal with so what development created this routine? It would have to be pure ad-hoc-ery and that suggests that in Cruise's approach to the last-mile/endless-corner-cases problem of self-driving cars is just that, a series of ad-hoc fixed. And this approach can neither be safe nor can it scale.

And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. Why didn't the "you've just had a collision" signal not pull a human? (maybe it did and not saying that is their problem but otherwise..) The main explanation I can think of is ... the car's routines are already calling pilots a lot and the team is working feverishly to reduce this. An ad-hoc pull-over routine is intended to reduce those calls back to the pilots. Admittedly this is speculation but if true it reinforces my conclusion above.

> And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations.

And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the vehicle", "am I in the middle of an intersection/interstate", etc., et al.

Even getting past that I think such a job would play absolute hell on epi, norepi, dopamine, etc., response and those people would burn out, quickly (and I say that as someone who spends a lot of time waking up to alarm tones going off before jumping in an ambulance or fire engine...).

I heard that the way Waymo works is that the car actually presents solutions, multiple-choice style, to the call center operator. The operator assesses the situation and chooses one, and then the car executes it. I assume there’s also a “none of the above”’or some such which would flag someone to come on site.

The remote operator cannot manually operate the car under these circumstances and that is by design.

Sounds like a 911 operator but more technical and more data available

And no possibility to dispatch.

By the time you're paged to handle the situation, the pedestrian is already trapped under the vehicle and you cannot see her because the car does not have an under-the-vehicle camera. So the only way you can handle this case is to rewind and review what happened before the collision and respond only then. Considering that the speed with which you react can be a matter of life and death, I don't see a satisfactory solution to this problem.

Why not have under-the-vehicle cameras and sensors?

> And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine?

I’m just going to assume it’s a liability thing:

* Cruise gets in an accident and stays in the road, passenger gets out and gets hit. * Cruise gets in an accident and pulls to the curb, passenger can get out on the curb (and if they don’t, and get hit, Cruise can claim it pulled over).

I could see this decision being made (or reviewed by) legal. Which sounds like a truly awful way to build a product.

I agree with you on the adhockery as well. Sounds like it.

> * Cruise gets in an accident and stays in the road, passenger gets out and gets hit.

Waymo handles this by notifying riders when vehicles or cyclists are incoming near passenger exits.

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