Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that re-quoting oneself proves the point. Got it. Too bad the folks at Cruise didn’t get the message.
And as we see, at least one other company, who calls their system “Pure Vision,” doesn’t think LiDAR is necessary.
What happened was that the Waymo vehicles were programmed on encountering dead traffic lights to “occasionally” phone into Waymo’s human-staffed remote center and ask for advice. Since there were so many dead traffic lights and so many Waymo vehicles, the remote center was overwhelmed, and the cars just sat there waiting to hear back.
None of Waymo’s redundancy or variety of sensors helped prevent this failure. Of course, only the cameras could see the traffic lights anyway - neither LiDAR nor radar nor USS can tell what color a traffic light is.
Waymo’s response is telling: rather than fix the general issue, they’re fixing only this specific problem for the future:
While our Driver already handles dark traffic signals as four-way stops, we are now rolling out fleet-wide updates that give our vehicles even more context about regional outages, allowing them to navigate these intersections more decisively.
The larger problem is what the vehicles do when they don’t get real-time support from the remote center. Current behavior is, apparently, to just sit there until the remote operator suggests a path. Fixing behavior on dead traffic lights is but one example of a larger problem, and who knows what the “context about regional outages” is and how that works?
Well, I said “driving autonomy” and “relatively soon,” so I find it telling that you mis-quoted me. And, no, I’m not going to define those for you. I’ll just prove my point by re-quoting myself: