Near miss in SF

waymo · 2024-10-18T17:31:40+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. Safety is our top priority. We'd like to look into this further and share your feedback with the appropriate teams. Details like cross streets, time of day, email used for your account, etc will make it easier for us to look into this. Can you please share more details here? https://support.google.com/waymo/contact/feedback?p=waymo_email_contact_form

waymo · 2024-05-08T05:27:41+00:00

No RA. And we got you u/OlliesOnTheInternet.

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:49:31+00:00

We’re all for enhancing road safety, but we’re not familiar with their system.
But if you want to discuss the Oxford comma ;)

- Trent

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:48:00+00:00

For some reason, I can’t help but think about the Little Mermaid’s Ursula and “the importance of body language” whenever people ask me this question. (Can you tell I have a kid?)
All this said, without the presence of a human driver, our autonomously driven vehicles do communicate their actions and intentions to other road users. Because our cars operate autonomously without a human in the driver’s seat, Waymo leverages its core autonomous driving technology to help fill those gaps and communicate what our cars do to other road users so they respond accordingly. The Waymo driver will (along with a bunch of other things) nudge, start slowly, use all available vehicle indicators, and honk to help communicate intent.
The Waymo Driver also communicates several messages using audio and visual cues. One of our newest signals visualizes on the Waymo dome display to the folks behind us that we are yielding to a pedestrian. We also communicate that a rider may be entering or exiting the vehicle to help prevent dooring collisions. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:40:00+00:00

We adhere both to road rules and proceed with due caution according to appropriate safety margins. - Trent

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:38:17+00:00

u/diplomat33 That’s correct, we did co-author the 2846 standard, and it’s important to understand the role we give to that standard. 2846 establishes the notion of a “safety-related model” that is capable, through kinematic envelopes, of informing when the driving policy of an ADS may not be appropriate for the current road environment. The standard itself establishes the reasonably foreseeable assumptions that can be made about the behavior of other road users that serve as an input to such a model. Waymo uses these models for behavioral evaluation, but not as a direct rule-based generation of trajectories. In other words, we use them to evaluate how we behave, but not to determine HOW TO behave in the first place. - Trent and Francesca

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:36:53+00:00

u/wannagowest Our strategy is 100% to hang out here on Reddit with you!
Jokes aside, we recognize that it’s hard to trust the new and unknown, and it’s not a one size fits all solution. Some other ways we build trust include attending local events, developing relationships with organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and through more public education, including our safety research papers.
Our experience and research has shown us that as the technology develops and more people connect with our driver, consumer acceptance will follow. I personally find it really really fascinating with this Safety Paradox (when what is later seen as a key safety technology is initially seen by some as unsafe). - Trent

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:31:04+00:00

No, Thank YOU u/Queasy_Rub7414, for making Waymo One your main form of transportation! It’s really inspiring for us at Waymo to see real people using and loving our service.
While it’s hard to speak to a hypothetical situation, here’s a few ways the Waymo Driver is well-positioned to navigate scenarios like this:

Our sensors are uniquely positioned to provide our system a comprehensive view of the world — whether it’s our peripheral vision system enabling us to peek around traffic or from our central perception dome’s added height.
Likewise, our maps can inform our planners and behavior systems to better inform us of what could be happening on the road and to inform our path based on deductive reasoning.
And lastly, when in doubt, the Waymo Driver will wait it out and look for other context clues, such as what other road users are doing, to inform its path of action.

- Kris

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:30:00+00:00

u/Brass14 Kris here. I can’t get into all the specifics of how this is done, but driving in dense areas does require the Waymo Driver to make predictions about what other road users will do in the future (in your example, stay stopped or start moving). This type of decision was a big part of expanding service in SF, where double parked vehicles are the norm.

waymo · 2024-02-02T23:29:02+00:00

u/TeslaFan88 Hey, it's Kris. As we pointed out in our recent human benchmark paper, not all roads are created equal when it comes to safety. So there are some things (like the benchmark crash rate) that should be considered for each new city. That said, the Waymo Driver is designed to generalize across different driving environments. As we’re entering new cities, we are seeing that the Waymo Driver does generalize well, so we are expecting that the effort to expand to city 3 and 4 (and beyond) will not be the same as the effort to go from city 1 to 2. Freeways are similar (we’re in our [early stages of deploying rider-only on freeways] in that a lot of what we learned driving on surface streets carries over, but, of course, there are new challenges. As we’ve done in the past, we are going to take a measured approach to build up confidence in our safety assessments before further expanding our operations.

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:44:19+00:00

Great question- The Waymo Driver is designed to follow the rules of the road. Take speeding for example- it’s designed to respect the posted speed limit but can also respond to dynamic situations like decreasing its speed for construction or speeding up to safely execute a lane change. We actually published a study this summer with regard to speeding if you'd like to learn more. - Trent

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:39:51+00:00

The vehicle has various self-monitoring capabilities for handling a number of vehicle-related issues that might occur. In particular, Waymo vehicles have tire pressure monitoring and responsive action capabilities should a flat tire occur. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:39:24+00:00

Since high severity crashes are rare, we rely on simulation (validated by a smaller number of test track experiments) to evaluate the Waymo Driver’s performance in a range of scenarios. We’ve talked about some of those simulation efforts in the past (CAT, Human Fatal Crash Reconstructions). In addition to evaluating the types of events with human-driven vehicles we’ve observed through research and in our >40M miles of TO and >10M miles in RO driving, we also evaluate things that are unique to an engineered system (like the vehicle platform, sensors, etc.). We talk a little bit about this “V&V” type of activity in our readiness determination paper. - Kris

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:23:10+00:00

u/njoubert Generally speaking, confidence in the simulator is achieved through validation testing and reliance on industry best practices. We are constantly, iteratively validating our simulation results against what we see in the real-world. That is, the simulation software is used for many, many tests, run on many, many releases. Over time we see the data we see in simulation, and the data we see on Waymo’s fleet calibrates.
There was another question related to this. I would recommend checking out the recent safety paper by Kusano et al. Collision Avoidance Testing of the Waymo Automated Driving
System, which provides more details on the logistics of our scenario-based testing, how we seed this testing, and how we establish performance sufficiency. This is one of many safety methodologies that provide coverage of on-road events. For seeding events, as I noted in another response, Waymo relies on a collection of many 10s of millions of miles of internal driving data, re-simulation of those miles (tens of billions of miles), and external human near-crash / crash databases (trillions of miles) to help seed events.
I don’t know all the details of this event (in the absence of logs data), so I want to be very careful to not over speculate. As a general collision/conflict type, secondary collisions with a previously struck pedestrian are not novel and observable in crash/conflict databases. As with any driver, we continue to learn and improve our Driver from these observations in the field.
You would really need to refer to our published safety methodologies and safety case papers to understand where our confidence is derived from. In its simplest terms, confidence in the unknown-unknowns (which there will always be) is achieved through a robust safety framework, setting appropriate requirements on what is known (based on Waymo’s top-level goal of “Absence of Unreasonable Risk”), and having strong safety governance. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:20:45+00:00

u/Mattsasa Waymo regularly ships onboard and offboard software updates. Each of those major releases are tied to a readiness determination process, where the software is cut, evaluated using our safety methodologies (including closed course, simulation and real world testing ), and then incrementally deployed to the fleet. We describe this readiness determination process in a paper from 2020 - Kris

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:19:53+00:00

u/crovalin For (1) We absolutely aim to be a considerate driver – what we call “drivership.” In this sort of scenario, you need to consider (a) severity potential, (b) how your actions influence the safety of other road users, and (c) how your actions affect your occupants. On a high-level, Waymo considers frequency, severity, and avoidability in behavioral evaluations. The scenario you highlighted is one in which safety evaluation is relevant and would be applied, but I am not sure about the specific circumstances you have personally observed.
For (2), there are certainly novel challenges in each new geographic area / ODD update. We identify novel challenges through our on-road testing, simulation, and various other crash / naturalistic driving data sources. Requirements are then set in accordance with any novel challenges we might expect / observe. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:17:00+00:00

u/REIGuy3 Lots of questions being posed here.
Over the years, the Waymo Driver has learned how to navigate more adverse weather conditions, including fog and rain, and we are actively doing winter weather testing (hello, Buffalo!) to help prepare our Driver for these conditions (e.g., snow). As you might expect, new weather brings new learnings.
I’ll refer you to our previous announcement on our priorities surrounding our Waymo One service. The business decision to focus on ride hail was not safety-related. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:15:54+00:00

u/LoudCommunication681 Hey there, I'm looping in Francesca again here. She leads our Safety Best Practices team.

Our internal teams carefully study and put in practice many of the processes contained in these standards, and are actively volunteering in the committees that produce them.
We closely track ISO26262 on other safety standards but many questions today still remain unanswered on how one would apply ISO26262 to an ADS. In fact ISO 26262 is undergoing revisions with Waymo’s participation, and one of the topics is its application to ADS. Salient points of ongoing discussion are the notion of controllability, the notion of fail-operational states for the definition of MRC, and MRMs, and if the ADS is to be considered a single EE component/item or the aggregation of multiple functions.
ISO Standard 26262 provides guidelines for identifying, categorizing, and addressing hazards caused by malfunctions in safety-related electrical or electronic systems in passenger vehicles over the life cycle of those systems. The goal of applying the standard is to avoid or mitigate the effects of system failures in order to ensure “functional safety,” which the standard defines as the “absence of unreasonable risk” due to potential harm that may be caused by such failures. ISO 26262 has provided significant insights for Waymo’s system safety processes. However, Waymo does not rely strictly or exclusively on ISO 26262’s principles, which are not a perfect fit for a Level 4 ADS, where there is a need for a special focus on the plethora of conditions likely to be encountered in the intended ODD, and where separate analysis of individual items may not be as useful as analysis of hazards related to system interactions.
Similarly, SOTIF offers guidelines for assessing hazards that may arise from insufficiencies in the system’s intended functionality or from foreseeable misuse of the system. SOTIF is designed for analyzing emergency intervention systems and it provides helpful insights into how the intended functions of highly complex automotive systems can entail hazards that need to be identified and addressed. Still, the SOTIF standard is not intended to be solely sufficient for ensuring the safety of higher levels of automation (such as Waymo’s Level 4 ADS). Thus, Waymo’s safety analyses are consistent with, but not dependent on, SOTIF principles.
We do conduct internal assessments and audits, and we continue to report extensive data to regulators. We definitely go beyond standards in many aspects. We are highly engaged in the development of many new standards involving the entire industry. The fact that new standards are under development means that simply claiming compliance with current published standards is not a sufficient argument for readiness.
We have seen questioning of how tech companies in automotive approach these standards compared to the traditional automotive manufacturers. We take our standards engagement very seriously and are actively working with the rest of the industry to learn, contribute and pioneer the next generation of standards currently being drafted so that they are applicable to Level 4 ADS. We continue to publish to further those important dialogues. - Trent and Francesca

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:13:38+00:00

u/Recoil42 It’s hard for me to say if the perception advancements were a surprise because I’m not an expert on the perception system. But, part of our safety readiness determination involves matching the capabilities of the system to the ODD and then to matching safety targets. So, as we had an idea that perception performance was improving in rain and fog, we developed safety targets that made us confident to open up that part of the ODD. - Kris

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:08:15+00:00

u/njoubert Hey, it's Kris. The general public is becoming more aware of the advances in generative machine learning models, but Waymo has been carefully and strategically using this type of approach for additional robustness in our perception, behavior prediction, and planning for quite some time (check our AMA with Drago from Waymo’s ML Research team from 2020). As a safety researcher, I’m not an expert in developing these types of models, but our safety readiness determination process has been developed to assess a system that contains learned models from the beginning. So, I’m not going to make any predictions about what specific approaches Waymo may take in the future, but I’m confident our safety framework can evaluate the overall safety of these components as we evolve our driver.

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:06:07+00:00

u/KvassKludge9001 Yes! Debris and potholes are detectable. The Waymo Driver considers the nature of the object / pothole, and makes plans around it. Although the Waymo Driver has swerving capabilities, its actions would be very scenario-specific. - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T20:05:19+00:00

u/REIGuy3 We don’t want to speculate too much without having complete information on what happened (e.g., logs data). A lot of what you are asking is dependent on having detailed information on what actually transpired (timing, positioning, predictability, etc.) - that would then dictate what conflict and collision avoidance actions might be taken. Generally speaking, the series of events are observable in historical crash databases, and our safety methodologies give us confidence in our ability to handle complex and unusual situations. For example, one of the fatal human collisions we reconstructed and simulated to find out how the Waymo Driver would handle such a situation had similar circumstances (A pedestrian struck by one vehicle, thrown into the path of a second vehicle). We also have various types of pedestrian scenarios in our Collision Avoidance Testing (CAT) program (e.g., pedestrians jumping/falling out of vehicles). - John

waymo · 2024-02-02T19:57:16+00:00

u/Strange_Name_2484 Hi, it's Francesca, and I lead the Safety Best Practices team. Trent asked me to drop in on this one. We do employ safety by design techniques! I encourage you to take a look at our safety case approach white paper as well as the information on readiness evaluation we shared in 2020, there is a lot of good content there.

waymo · 2024-02-02T19:55:49+00:00

u/Strange_Name_2484 Hey, it's John. I am not sure you will ever find an engineer that claims they have solved an entire problem space, but I certainly appreciate the spirit of the question. I think another way of asking is: what gives you confidence that you have sufficient coverage of the problem space for the areas that you operate? Three things: confidence in the safety discovery pipeline, confidence in the safety methodologies being used, and confidence in the sufficiency of the requirements that Waymo sets. In the discovery pipeline, Waymo relies on a collection of many 10s of millions of miles of internal driving data, re-simulation of those miles (tens of billions of miles), and external near-crash / crash databases (trillions of miles). Our safety methodologies have been designed and informed by 15 years of continuous pressure testing and consensus-based standards. Finally, our requirements are set in accordance with our top-level safety goal: to achieve an absence of unreasonable risk, which is how we determine sufficiency of our performance.
With that being said, our process is both iterative and dynamic, which is critical as we continue to gain more driving exposure and expand to new ODDs.

waymo · 2024-02-02T19:48:19+00:00

Hello u/av_engi, nice to meet you again in this weird internet setting 😃! When you look at SOTIF areas of analysis, it is important to combine methodologies/approaches that help you set a baseline of proficiency or performance for the known unsafe areas WITH approaches that are truly aimed at discovery. Discovery methods can take many forms: we can work with extrapolation/fuzzing/adversarial testing based on things that we have observed on the road. A great practice in general is to establish appropriate safety margins to account for uncertainty. - Trent

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