Waymo

[Doggydogworld]

The white SUV comes to a stop, presumably signaling (the video is of such poor quality it is hard to tell).

The SUV does NOT turn, in spite of there being no obvious traffic. This gives a clue.

It gives a clue that the oncoming car is going straight and the white SUV is yielding. If the oncoming car turns the white SUV is also free to turn.

At this point I have released the accelerator and am in regen before entering the intersection. Who knows what is obscured? At least bleed off a few mph!

You release the accelerator to position your foot over the brake. Waymo doesn't need to do that.

I also think the reaction was surprisingly slow given the superhuman response time that should be available to the Waymo Driver. I don't know why you'd path adjust before you started bleeding a lot of speed. There must be reasons but it seems non-optimal for a human driver response.

It looks to me like braking and steering happened simultaneously, a fraction of a second after the green path started to bend. There is latency in perception (e.g. 33 ms for 30 fps video) then additional latency in planner processing then finally latency in the electro-mechanical steering and brake actuators. With a decent quality YouTube we could go one frame at a time and measure things, but this blurry, jerky Twitter feed is useless.

 

[flutas]

Random thing I learned today, and honestly it makes a lot of the commercial aspects of Waymo make so much more sense.

Google doesn't actually run the commercial entity side of Waymo. Transdev does.

Robotaxis
Waymo – USA
Management of an on-demand fleet of robotaxis

Since 2019, Transdev, through its American subsidiary Transdev Alternative Services, has been testing, deploying, and operating Waymo’s robotaxi fleets (a subsidiary of Alphabet – Google) in four major cities in the United States (including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin).

Though this does have me wondering why they are using both older and newer SW versions than Waymo ever discloses. (Transdev shows incidents with version 7, 8, and 9, of Waymo 5th gen, Waymo only shows 8.)

 

[Bitdepth]

Random thing I learned today, and honestly it makes a lot of the commercial aspects of Waymo make so much more sense.

Google doesn't actually run the commercial entity side of Waymo. Transdev does.



Though this does have me wondering why they are using both older and newer SW versions than Waymo ever discloses. (Transdev shows incidents with version 7, 8, and 9, of Waymo 5th gen, Waymo only shows 8.)

Transdev is a subcontractor that provides test drivers they are not running the commercial aspects of Waymo.

Waymo Sees Human Drivers in Autonomous Cars for Foreseeable Future | Transport Topics

Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo took a big step forward last fall when it began ferrying riders around the Phoenix area in robotaxis without human safety drivers. Humans have been behind the wheel for almost all of the 20 million miles of testing the company says it has completed on public roads.

www.ttnews.com

The driverless rides in Arizona don’t mean the end for Waymo’s human operators. Last summer, the company quietly finalized a multiyear contract with Transdev North America, which provides bus drivers, streetcar conductors and other transportation workers to airports and cities. The partnership is an acknowledgment that Waymo will be relying on test drivers for many years to come.

Rather than supply Waymo with contractors for its driving operations, the deal provides test-driving as a service—a subtle but key distinction. Transdev replaces a handful of staffing companies that have subcontracted drivers to Waymo. Under those previous arrangements, drivers could work for only two years at a time with six-month breaks between stints — a rule meant to shield Waymo from claims that it was their employer. The partnership puts more legal space between the drivers and Waymo, allowing them to stay on indefinitely, as employees of Transdev.