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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Even normal stoplights can be added or removed. If a car needs an accurate internal map of every single stoplight, it's doomed.

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What about the case the stoplight stops functioning? This happens many times. Recently late at night in Flushing NY crew was working on replacing switches on the stoplight and that caused outage so the Department of Transportation actually have asked the police department to send out officers to help direct traffic. Yeah, good luck with that if we are running self-driving car.

Why? Two things could happen here: The self-driving car could recognize hand gestures. Or the police could carry a simple radio transmitter device which would transmit directions to the self-driving cars (while also making gestures for human-driven cars). This is hardly some insurmountable problem.

Self-driving car needs to adapt to the world; if police need a special device to communicate with the car, the car is unsafe and should be banned from public roads.

So the enormous benefits of self-driving cars (many saved lives, mobility for people who cannot drive, reduced costs) should be prevented because we cannot equip police with a few radio transmitters? -- Assuming that is even needed, because Waymo's cars can recognize gestures made by cyclists already, so it's hardly a stretch to imagine them recognizing gestures made by policemen.

It think it's more pragmatic than that. If Kansas doesn't want to equip their police with transmitters, then transmitters simply won't happen. It's a political problem which is much thornier than technical problems. I'm sure you could already apply that rubric today : If only government agency X would implement simple technology Y, everyone's life would be easier. In the real world, that fails to happen all the time.

Self driving cars are probably just going to have to recognize hand signals. That's simply the reality.

It's not just a matter of equipping police. Police are not the only people who occasionally need to make gestures that need to be recognized by cars: think construction workers in a crowded city, parking lot attendants, or anyone at the scene of an accident.

The car needs to be able to communicate with people outside of it, or it needs to have a human inside who can drive it.

Because I don't want my car stopping when a panhandler/hitchhiker/etc is trying to wave me down, this is actually a much more complicated problem than simply recognizing gestures.

Fortunately, recognizing hand gestures can be done.

I remember reading that Google's car do recognize hand gestures.

That is really interesting if true. Do you have any idea where you read it? I am genuinely interested; this is not some backhanded way of saying "citation needed."

I don't remember where I read it, but this is similar http://fortune.com/2016/07/06/google-self-driving-cars-cycli...

A bit of web searching goes a long way:

http://search.lycos.com/web/?q=google+car+recognize+hand+ges...

http://www.webcrawler.com/serp?q=google+cars+recognize+hand+...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Google%27s+car+do+recognize+hand+g...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Google%27s%20car...

I don't think the transmitter option is viable until there's a critical mass of self-driving cars that all agree on the same communications protocol. And, as we all know, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

That's the current status of self driving cars.

And yes, I think they are doomed. At least for city streets - I expect them on specially instrumented freeways though.

Delphi actively looks for traffic lights at every intersection with their self-driving technology, or at least they used to.

> That's the current status of self driving cars.

Do you work in the field? I'm a bit skeptical about that. Waymo's self-driving car seems to do pretty well with things that aren't encoded in maps like road works and unexpected obstacles. I don't see why red lights would be exceptionally challenging to detect.

Tesla's demo video of their fully self driving software looks pretty good too.

A talk about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5E28fp4oc0

There are also temporary traffic lights added and removed during road works.

There are also pranksters that turn traffic lights by 90° to make them face the wrong direction.

Those are hard to map.

To anyone with a moderate driving experience, this should be obvious

This seems to be a decision on par with "depend on left-pad". reliability wise

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