Thought it might be nice to have a thread where people can list out corner cases they run into on a daily basis that would likely cause trouble for an autonomous car or at least not be handled as well as a human driver typically would. This will serve a few purposes.
1) A reminder of how hard a problem this really is.
2) Perhaps as an informational resource for people working on autonomous driving technology who want some ideas on things they haven't thought of yet.
3) As evidence that a human is not as inferior as many take them to be.
I'll start. On my drive home today, I encountered 3 different situations worth mentioning.
1) A work truck pulled onto the highway in front of me dragging an enormous limb underneath of it. Now true I live in redneck country, and this wasn't even a surprising sight. Might be a rare thing in most places, but that's typical of a corner case. Since following the truck would have a high risk of having a close encounter with an enormous limb, the safe thing to do was to either back off or pass the truck.
2) A little more common. Well, a lot more common. I was driving on the highway and there was a car at the side of the road with people near it. Since the passing lane was clear, I pulled into the passing lane to give the people more space. This is also somewhat of a safety thing. It's also a judgement call that might be challenging for a computer to make, because you have to assess how crowded the passing lane is and whether or not pulling into the passing lane is ultimately safer for all parties.
3) Near home, I was on the highway and a service truck was driving slowly on the shoulder, but the shoulder was not wide enough for the truck, so it was hanging into the right most lane. There were 3 lanes. I was in the middle lane, and another car was to the right of me and slightly ahead of me approaching the service truck. The left most lane was not clear, so I slowed just enough to allow space for the car on my right to pull into my lane in order to drive around the service truck.
Now some of these are might partially just be courtesy, but they were all cases where either I was a better driver than an autonomous car, or the autonomous car would have to have some really advanced capability.
1) A reminder of how hard a problem this really is.
2) Perhaps as an informational resource for people working on autonomous driving technology who want some ideas on things they haven't thought of yet.
3) As evidence that a human is not as inferior as many take them to be.
I'll start. On my drive home today, I encountered 3 different situations worth mentioning.
1) A work truck pulled onto the highway in front of me dragging an enormous limb underneath of it. Now true I live in redneck country, and this wasn't even a surprising sight. Might be a rare thing in most places, but that's typical of a corner case. Since following the truck would have a high risk of having a close encounter with an enormous limb, the safe thing to do was to either back off or pass the truck.
2) A little more common. Well, a lot more common. I was driving on the highway and there was a car at the side of the road with people near it. Since the passing lane was clear, I pulled into the passing lane to give the people more space. This is also somewhat of a safety thing. It's also a judgement call that might be challenging for a computer to make, because you have to assess how crowded the passing lane is and whether or not pulling into the passing lane is ultimately safer for all parties.
3) Near home, I was on the highway and a service truck was driving slowly on the shoulder, but the shoulder was not wide enough for the truck, so it was hanging into the right most lane. There were 3 lanes. I was in the middle lane, and another car was to the right of me and slightly ahead of me approaching the service truck. The left most lane was not clear, so I slowed just enough to allow space for the car on my right to pull into my lane in order to drive around the service truck.
Now some of these are might partially just be courtesy, but they were all cases where either I was a better driver than an autonomous car, or the autonomous car would have to have some really advanced capability.