Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes.
How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
People exercise coordination ability like this all the time.
I got stuck getting out of shoreline after a large concert with abnormal parking conditions, and when we didn't move for 30 minutes I got out of the car and directed traffic so both lots could empty equally. Took another 45 minutes for my family to catch up to me, which was good because that's when someone in a safety vest showed up and told me to stop.
Firemen have access keys to various things. You could have a Waymo device for the same that similarly facilitates an override. Or at the very least provides a line with a manual operator that can override on the Waymo side.
As far as I know the driverless operators already have manual operators that can be contacted by emergency services. In some cases there seem to be human communication failures on top of the driverless failures.
Nah. You're never going to get law enforcement and road workers to reliably use the same signs. My local city hires the lowest bidder to do road repairs. You're lucky if those guys are consistently awake and sober. Autonomous vehicles will have to operate in the real world, not in some idealized utopia where everyone consistently follows written rules.
Most of those problems can be handled by moving very slowly and carefully, and allowing lots of safe distance around anything that looks like an emergency. That seems to be Waymo's default. They understand some traffic cop hand signals. But most human drivers won't get those, either. There's not much in the Vehicle Code about that.
CALTRANS uses trucks with big flashing arrows and portable collision barriers on the back to protect road workers ahead. They make no attempt to make ordinary drivers do anything more complex than stop or change lanes.
The people from Pepe's Towing in LA post videos of large vehicle accident recoveries, and they often talk about road worker coordination problems. They have to coordinate with CALTRANS, the California Highway Patrol, local cops, fire departments, HAZMAT services, railroads, terminal and port operators, and the drivers involved. The pros who clean up such messes seem to know each other, at least by reputation, but the drivers are often clueless. Pepe's has two questions for drivers - how heavy is your load, and what are you carrying? The answers they get run about 80% "duh". Those are the drivers who roll over semis on freeway ramps.
When autonomous trucking gets going, that kind of coordination will be necessary. But not for passenger cars.
Waymo already operates in the real world, including construction sites with non standard operating parameters. You can always add on to what the “real world” looks like, because real world isn’t static like you rightly pointed out.
if a cop has to have a specific piece of equipment to get the cars to move then it's always going to be a problem. The cops can move every other vehicile with a standard issue piece of equipment, aka their hands, and well yelling at people. If they have to get some magic QR gloves or placards to get waymos to move then that's going to be an issue.
