Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

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There have been many instances of Waymo preventing a collision by predicting pedestrians emerging from occlusion. This isn’t new information at all for them. Some accidents are simply physically impossible to prevent. I don’t know for sure if this one was one of those, but I’m fairly confident it couldn’t have been from prediction failure.

See past examples:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hubWIuuz-e4 — first save is a child emerging from a parked car. Notice how Waymo slows down preemptively before the child starts moving.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/ivQPuExwNW — detects foot movement from under the bus.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/LURJ8isQJ6 — stops for dogs and children running onto the street at night.

> detects foot movement ..

That’s probably how they do it, which is again very clever stuff, chapeau. But they do it like that b/c they can’t really predict the world around them fast enough. It might be possible in the future with AI World Models though

What do you mean “fast enough”? You can’t predict something that doesn’t exist i.e. not visible to the sensors. A Waymo wouldn’t move at all if it assumed people would always jump out of nowhere.

Even if you detect “fast enough”, there are physical limits for braking and coming to a stop.

You are predicting stuff that your sensors don’t see all the time my friend

You’re being vague and hand-wavy yet again.

Do you stop at every double parked vehicle when you’re driving? A Waymo would never move if it always predicted pedestrians would jump in front of it out of nowhere or the car next it would swerve at 65 mph. It’s physically impossible to stop in time for many accidents, unless you’re already stopped.

I agree but if you can infer that maybe there are children running around because it’s the time they get out of school etc, then yes, you stop at every double parked car.. I’m not saying it’s easy to do, I’m just saying that’s a limitation of the system, that still already does miracles..

This one should have been prevented because the Waymo should have been driving at max 10mph

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