alt Hacker News> The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?
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This is the right way to look at it. For autonomous fleets, there are typically tiers of intervention, starting with a simple remote check - "can I drive through this?" type confirmation, to much more detailed remote instructions that are slower to give, to getting someone from operations out (or in an emergency first responders) to manually move the car. One reason why you might want to keep traditional controls in the vehicle for the near term.
It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.
> Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
For Waymo, it's this one.