A standard ride has become a potential setting for the upcoming “Calm Down” season when Google’s autonomous taxi gets stuck after an encounter with simple cones and decides to escape from its rescue team.
Photo: Waymo
A few months ago we told you about Joel Johnson, a student at the University of Arizona who joined the Waymo testing program (Google’s sister company) And it documents almost all of his travels. At the service of the autonomous taxi service (Phase 4) of the company. For the most part, these are almost boring videos in which the vehicle is driven very normally and calmly, but in his latest video, one can glimpse cases where autonomous vehicles cannot cope with unexpected cases and how the team reacts. of Waymo support.
The great enemy of the car: a cone.
Johnson’s video starts out like any other video, when he installs a camera in the car and shows the ride without any editing. But as of 12:30 it is in a problematic situation where the vehicle’s navigation system seeks to turn right in what appears to be a lane blocked with orange cones, while the adjacent lane traveling in the same lane. address is still open. The car gets stuck in her face and Johnson is forced to signal the other drivers to catch up with him until the car notices that she has approached the support team. Johnson receives a call from a human representative who explains that a rescue team is on their way to him. It should be noted that the phone support team stayed on the line with Johnson throughout the rescue team’s wait, tried to reassure him (although he was quite calm and smiling), and even credited him with the amount of the trip.
After a few minutes of waiting, the car suddenly started to make the troublesome turn. But after a short time, it collided with the cones again and stopped again, this time getting completely stuck between the two lanes and interfering with traffic. The call to the rescue team was canceled for no apparent reason, and the support team was forced to call her again. Suddenly the vehicle is put into reverse, trying to get out of the situation and actually plug in all the available lanes.
Coincidentally, even the writers of the comedy series would not attempt to write, as soon as the Waymo rescue team arrives, the road workers also arrive and remove the cones that confused the system. Moments later, when the rescue team heads to Johnson, the car begins to accelerate and continues to drive while the caller sounds quite confused by what is happening (but offers to stay on the line with Johnson). The car collides with what you guessed: another cruel cone and stalls again.
This time the rescue team reaches Johnson’s car, but the car begins a wild ride and is wiped from them. Soon the door lock is released and the rescue team climbs into the vehicle to complete the journey manually. In this part, Johnson seeks to preserve the privacy of the rescuer and decides to dub it instead of settling for subtitles, as if this video hadn’t been funny and weird until now. The driver refuses to respond to the events that have occurred and refers Johnson to Waymo technical support (who, by the way, will contact him independently anyway after the trip has been flagged as faulty).
The company claims that the remote team provided incorrect instructions.
At Waymo, they provided Johnson with a full response to the case, claiming that during the trip, the vehicle identified an exceptional case and approached the company’s remote assistance team only to instruct the vehicle on how to proceed. However, it is noted at Waymo that the crew gave the vehicle incorrect instructions, causing it to jam and forcing the company to dispatch its physical rescue team. It should be noted that Google’s remote support team cannot take over the vehicle, but only provide you with general guidelines for dealing with troublesome events. By the way, only for cases like this are there developments such as the Ottopia Israeli, which allows operators to drive remotely in autonomous vehicles encountering various problems.
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