- Waymo explains why its robot froze last weekend during a major power outage in San Francisco.
- The passenger transportation company has temporarily suspended its operations in the Gulf region.
- The power outage led to many traffic signals being cut off, and for this reason, self-driving cars sent a lot of confirmation requests to remote human operators.
Waymo, the largest operator of robotaxis in the United States A tough time in San Francisco last weekendwhen a massive power outage left nearly 130,000 residents without power.
The power outage also knocked out several traffic signals, and Waymo’s robotaxis were not happy about that. Many videos and photos on social media showed the driver without a driver Jaguar I-Pace Electric vehicles are stuck at intersections, with their hazard lights on.
The company eventually temporarily pulled the cars and resumed operations after power was restored to the majority of the affected area. But it caused some chaos, and now we know why. The Alphabet-owned driverless taxi company has issued an update explaining what led to the freeze on taxis.
In short, it all came down to too many dark traffic lights, resulting in too many confirmation requests being sent to the home base, where human operators had to review each request and tell the car what to do. The large number of calls home led to a backlog, causing autonomous electric vehicles to freeze while waiting for a response.
“While Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic lights as a four-way stop, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it is making the safest option,” the company wrote in a blog post. Blog post. “While we successfully got through more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage resulted in a concentrated increase in these requests. This created a backlog, which, in some cases, delayed response and contributed to congestion on already congested streets.”
I asked Waymo whether slower-than-usual LTE upload and download speeds also played a role in the situation, and I’ll update this story when I hear back.
After this episode is completed and dusted off, the Alphabet-owned robo-taxi operator said it is analyzing the event and is already making changes to the way taxis handle situations like this. Waymo is now rolling out a fleet-wide update that gives its vehicles more context about regional outages. The company said this would enable electric vehicles to navigate intersections with dark traffic lights more decisively.
“We created these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and are now working on improving them to fit our current scale,” the company said.
