Waymo is delivery a software program replace to assist its robotaxis navigate disabled visitors lights throughout energy outages “extra decisively,” the corporate stated Tuesday in a blog post that explains why its self-driving autos acquired caught at intersections throughout a blackout in San Francisco this previous weekend.
Waymo stated the self-driving system in its robotaxis treats useless cease lights as four-way stops, similar to people are purported to. That ought to have allowed the robotaxis to function usually despite the large outage.
As an alternative, most of the autos requested a “affirmation verify” from Waymo’s fleet response team to verify what they had been doing was right. All Waymo robotaxis have the power to make these affirmation checks. With such a widespread outage on Saturday, there was a “concentrated spike” in these affirmation requests, Waymo stated, which helped create all of the congestion caught on video.
Waymo stated it constructed this affirmation request system “out of an abundance of warning throughout our early deployment” however that it’s now refining it to “match our present scale.”
“Whereas this technique was efficient throughout smaller outages, we at the moment are implementing fleet-wide updates that present the [self-driving software] with particular energy outage context, permitting it to navigate extra decisively,” the corporate wrote.
The software program replace will add “much more context about regional outages” to the corporate’s self-driving software program. Waymo additionally stated it’ll enhance its emergency response protocols by “incorporating classes from this occasion.”
Whereas numerous focus has been positioned on the situations the place Waymo’s robotaxis acquired caught in the course of the energy outage, the corporate shared that its autos “efficiently traversed greater than 7,000 darkish indicators on Saturday.”
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“Navigating an occasion of this magnitude introduced a singular problem for autonomous know-how,” the corporate wrote.
Saturday’s mess is the newest instance of how Waymo continues to be uncovering unexpected points with its software program and its strategy to designing a dependable fleet of self-driving autos. The corporate already needed to ship a number of software program updates to make its robotaxis await stopped college buses, which prompted a Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration investigation and led to a recall.
