this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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"with some residents rendering them immobile by putting orange cones on the cars’ hoods in protest. "
Could someone explain this? How does an orange cone on the hood immobilize these things?
It's hilarious really. They sense a foreign object and they have to assume an incident happened, so they sit disabled. They go into a shutdown mode until a technician goes on the scene and resets it. As to the technical reasons for "why", that's proprietary and closed source, but based on the behavior we can infer a lot.
Yep, and for good reason honestly. I work in CV and while I don't work on autonomous vehicles, many of the folks I know have previously worked at companies or research institutes on these kinds of problems and all of them agree that in a scenario like this, you should treat the state of the vehicle as compromised and go into an error/shutdown mode.
Nobody wants to give their vehicle an override that can potentially harm the safety of those inside it or around it, and practically speaking there aren't many options that guarantee safety other than this.
But don't they have some sort of remote control? Does it need a technician to see that somebody just put a random cone in there?
"Waymo technician disables safety feature, car kills pedestrian" Or "Waymo disables safety feature to deal with orange codes, car plowed through construction area and killed ten workers"
Not that it's happened, but I imagine their risk management advice says they have to send a tech out to reset it.
"Waymo technician disables safety feature and car kills pedestrian, hacks Bluetooth and starts making threats against humanity"
See, just not worth it.