If you haven't tried to solve the self-driving car problem in a practical environment, there's a powerful tendency to get caught in edge cases. The vast majority of situations encountered by an autonomous vehicle involve complex but conventional problems, and yield relatively well to rules-based coding.
If someone builds a snowman by the side of the road, my AV may mistake it for a human and start calculating possible paths it might take. But then the same thing can happen for utility poles, mailboxes, or piles of garbage. We find that if the potential human remains stationary, moving around it cautiously is usually a sufficient solution.
On the other hand, if someone builds a snowman in the middle of the street, the initial response of an AV and a human driver will be the same: stop and analyze the situation. No responsible human is going to drive through a snowman, so that's not an option for the AV either. Since the snowman will always remain stationary, however, the AV is likely to treat it like other road-obstructing obstacles (such as double-parked vehicles, another significant but more common problem) and eventually move around it.
Don't get me wrong -- it would be great if we could imbue an AV with "common sense." But I would argue that you can solve at least 99% of the problem without it.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadIf someone builds a snowman by the side of the road, my AV may mistake it for a human and start calculating possible paths it might take. But then the same thing can happen for utility poles, mailboxes, or piles of garbage. We find that if the potential human remains stationary, moving around it cautiously is usually a sufficient solution.
On the other hand, if someone builds a snowman in the middle of the street, the initial response of an AV and a human driver will be the same: stop and analyze the situation. No responsible human is going to drive through a snowman, so that's not an option for the AV either. Since the snowman will always remain stationary, however, the AV is likely to treat it like other road-obstructing obstacles (such as double-parked vehicles, another significant but more common problem) and eventually move around it.
Don't get me wrong -- it would be great if we could imbue an AV with "common sense." But I would argue that you can solve at least 99% of the problem without it.