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.

Comments

good for them...test and test again...data

[turkeydance]

how do they simulate snow?

Self driving cars will be hacked

[craXORjack]

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)

Cars still need work

[TWX]

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.

Re:Cars still need work

[diesalesmandie]

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.

This is a good example of where current machine learning (what people incorrectly call AI) doesn't work. Sure, in a discrete solution space like the go game (a LOT of different solutions, but still a discrete solution space) machine learning can beat the best human, but, in a semi-discrete, semi-continuous solution space like traffic (semi-discrete in the sense that the vehicle is bounded by the road, semi-continuous in the sense that a hazard/obstruction/malfunction/misinterpretation could be anything a.k.a. real life) it's just not good enough yet.

I don't claim to be a expert, i'm just giving my (not recently researched) opinion. Feel free to mod me into oblivion, if you think i'm talking through my ass.

Re:Cars still need work

[TWX]

I don't think that you're talking through your ass in this case. Human drivers, and arguably human beings in general both learn how to predict what will happen, and when to take risks if their predictions are less than certain. This doesn't mean that humans are immune to making errors as the auto accident statistics strongly demonstrate, but in this case a human driver probably would have seen the lane restriction and the reason for it from further out, and even if not (like following a large vehicle that chose to merge at the last moment) the human driver would recognize what the people in the median are actually doing and judge it reasonably safe that they're not going to walk out in front of traffic without warning.

In short, the human driver is going to call on his life experiences while driving in order to attempt to predict the behavior of his surroundings. Even a novice fifteen year old with a learner's permit has fifteen years of learning about some forms of human behavior, and would probably recognize a worker with a hardhat at a wood chipper as someone unlikely to cross into the right-of-way. A computer system doesn't learn in that fashion.

Re:Why cities and towns?

[Tenebrousedge]

If we lived in China and could arbitrarily decide to change our infrastructure on a large scale, yes, that might be a better idea. Otherwise, no, it would not be safer, and it makes little or no sense to implement this technology before it can deal with complicated hazards. If today you want an autonomous vehicle with a dedicated lane, build light rail. Preferably on the model of Portland, not SF.

I'm thinking you must be a software engineer.

Re:Roundabouts"??

[apoc.famine]

Yeah, those are fucking hard! You have to look left, and if nobody is coming, you go. And then if someone is coming you have to...I don't know...not go or something? JESUS THAT'S COMPLICATED!!!
 
And then once you're in them, it's SCARY AS FUCK! You have to figure out if you're taking the FIRST RIGHT, the SECOND RIGHT, OR THE THIRD RIGHT!!! And if you miss one, I think you die or something. It's not like you can just go around again.