Waymo's autonomous driving technology navigates a police controlled intersection
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as evidence that self-driving cars can obey traffic cops, though some call the scenario idealized.
What it is
A Waymo clip, sped up 3x, showing its autonomous car stopping at a broken traffic light and proceeding on a police officer's hand signals.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Cites icebraining · 2019-12 · on “AGI Has Been Delayed”
> Navigating a construction zone with a flag man directing you on the opposite shoulder requires a brain, not pattern matching. Why? Waymo cars can already follow the hand instructions of traffic cops[1], why couldn't they follow that too? [1] [this video]
Cites sumgame · 2020-03 · on “The 5th-generation Waymo Driver”
It isn't necessary and the best example of this is Tesla's autopilot. It uses no Lidar component and Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human. He's been a long time anti lidar proponent because of the costs involved and the aesthetics. He's also betting that the amount of data Tesla receives from its customers, and the neural net they have can achieve autonomous driving with its current hardware stack. “In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of,” Musk said. He added, “Pe
Cites ra7 · 2021-11 · on “Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City”
Waymo claims their cars can detect environment changes and share it with the rest of the fleet in real time, with most of the map update process automated. They've written a blog post on this topic: [LINK] As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand signals: [this video] . No reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with some improvements.
Critical StanislavPetrov · 2021-11 · on “Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City”
>As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand signals: [this video] . No reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with some improvements. This is an incredibly idealized version of "traffic cop" that doesn't exist in NYC. Here's an extremely well disciplined example of a traffic cop in NYC. They don't stand in one place, they are constantly challenged by traffic from all direction, they sometimes stop certain lanes, and tell other ones to go, with all sorts of gestures. And this is only a 4 way intersection without much traffic, and without any construction or significant pedestrian traffic. Its one thing to program an AI car that can drive under idealized, predictable condi