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Waymo Built a Fake City In California To Test Self-Driving Cars (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In May, Waymo revealed key details of its latest self-driving car design to Bloomberg as part of the rollout of a new program that ferries ordinary passengers around in Phoenix. Now The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal has a new piece revealing important details about Waymo's extensive infrastructure for testing self-driving cars. Madrigal reports on two Waymo projects that haven't been previously made public. One is an extensive virtual city in California, 100 miles east of Silicon Valley. Named Castle after the former Castle Air Force Base, the facility hosts a network of private roads for testing self-driving vehicles. It's a proprietary cousin of Mcity, the open vehicle testing facility we visited in 2015. At the Castle facility, Waymo builds replicas of real intersections -- like a two-lane roundabout in Texas -- that have given Waymo cars trouble.
Having their own extensive network of private streets allows Waymo engineers to perform repetitive tests to observe how Waymo's software reacts in carefully controlled situations. In one series of tests seen by Madrigal, another car cuts off a Waymo car at a variety of speeds and angles. The tests were designed to help engineers calibrate how hard cars brake in these kinds of situations. Brake too slowly and there's a risk of a crash. Brake too hard and passengers will get whiplash. The Castle team has amassed an extensive collection of props -- traffic cones, tricycles, fake plants, dummies -- that help simulate a wide variety of road situations.
Having their own extensive network of private streets allows Waymo engineers to perform repetitive tests to observe how Waymo's software reacts in carefully controlled situations. In one series of tests seen by Madrigal, another car cuts off a Waymo car at a variety of speeds and angles. The tests were designed to help engineers calibrate how hard cars brake in these kinds of situations. Brake too slowly and there's a risk of a crash. Brake too hard and passengers will get whiplash. The Castle team has amassed an extensive collection of props -- traffic cones, tricycles, fake plants, dummies -- that help simulate a wide variety of road situations.
how do they simulate snow?
Someday terrorists will upload a zero day worm that spreads from car to car turning our quiet city streets into Death Race 2000. (David Carradine RIP)
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
This disclosure gives me some comfort that they at least have a non-production test environment :) and I like that they built specific scenes replicating places and incidents where they had reported problems... good approach.
Maybe build a catalog of unique features and road incidents and let all manufacturers test against it (for a fee) so we can build confidence in everyone's models.
They're training their autonomous robots in urban warfare to run us down on the streets.
Saw a funny one a couple of weeks ago. A Waymo car (technically a Pacifica minivan) was essentially stuck. The street had a median and a maintenance crew had closed the left lane with cones, and they had a wood chipper trailer and truck, and the various workers were cutting apart trees that had tipped over and were dragging pieces over to the chipper's hopper, which faced oncoming traffic.
The Waymo car was up at the start of the cones, and it couldn't interpret what the workers were doing and couldn't figure out how to merge-right. I think it was assuming the workers were going to run out into the street, so it would begin to move right but would stop as soon as a worker moved, and the rest of the vehicle traffic that was moving-right was just thick enough that it couldn't manage to get moving in those few seconds when workers were not being interpreted as an obstruction.
It was pretty funny to watch, and the employee in the car gave it a good ten minutes before giving up and manually taking control.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Castle team has amassed an extensive collection of props -- traffic cones, tricycles, fake plants, dummies -- that help simulate a wide variety of road situations.
That sounds pretty good. The rounds around where I live are indeed filled with dummies.
Why not focus on the real and more fixable issue of highway commutes? Am I way off base in thinking that it would be far easier and safer to introduce fully autonomous cars onto highways first? Infrastructure wise you could first establish autonomous only lanes then gradually make all highways autonomous once the technology has been vetted and has become ubiquitous.
"Waymo builds replicas of real intersections -- like a two-lane roundabout in Texas -- that have given Waymo cars trouble."
Roundabouts give everyone trouble. I absolutely despise them. They should be banned.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Isn't that redundant?
A hundred years from now, gullible investors will still be parted from their money. Schmucks. Go ahead believe. I got a bridge to sell ya. And some magic beans. And some data that is worth more than oil.
"Fake" implies intent to deceive. Simulations and models aren't constructed to deceive, they are constructed to test things, like theories or machines, or airline pilots.
I guess there's nothing we can do, short of assassination, to stop Trump from labeling any information he doesn't like as "fake," but it would be nice if the rest of us could refrain from torturing the language like that.