Waymo said Tuesday in a blog post explaining why its self-driving cars got stuck at intersections during last weekend’s power outages in San Francisco that it will ship a software update that will allow robotaxis to “more decisively” navigate faulty traffic lights during power outages.
Waymo said the robotaxi’s self-driving system treats dead-end lights as four-way stops, just as humans would. That way, robotaxis would have been able to operate normally despite the large-scale power outage.
Instead, many vehicles asked Waymo’s fleet response team for a “verification check” to make sure they were doing the right thing. All Waymo robotaxis have the ability to perform these verification checks. With such a widespread outage on Saturday, Waymo said there was a “centralized spike” in these verification requests, which caused all the congestion captured on video.
Waymo said it built the verification request system “with great care during initial implementation,” but is now revamping it “for today’s scale.”
“While this strategy was effective during small outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates. [self-driving software] “This allows for more decisive responses considering specific power outage situations,” the company wrote.
The software update will add “more detailed information about regional power outages” to the company’s self-driving software. Waymo also said it would improve its emergency response protocols by “incorporating lessons learned from this incident.”
While much of the focus has been on instances of Waymo’s robotaxis getting stuck during power outages, the company shared that its vehicles “successfully passed through more than 7,000 dark lights on Saturday.”
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“Navigating an event of this scale posed a unique challenge for self-driving technology,” the company wrote.
Saturday’s disruption is the latest example of how Waymo continues to uncover unexpected problems with its software and approach to designing a fleet of reliable self-driving cars. The company has already had to ship multiple software updates to let robot taxis wait for stopped school buses, prompting an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and leading to a recall.
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