"US opens probe into Alphabet's Waymo over 'unexpected behavior' of self-driving vehicles"

From Reuters, May 14:

U.S. auto safety regulators said on Tuesday they have opened an investigation into the performance of Alphabet's Waymo self-driving vehicles after reports of its robotaxis exhibiting driving behavior that potentially violated traffic safety laws.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said its preliminary evaluation into an estimated 444 Waymo vehicles follows 22 reports of 22 incidents including 17 collisions. 

The agency said in some of those cases the automated driving systems "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices" and some crashes occurred shortly after the automated driving systems "exhibited unexpected behavior near traffic safety control devices."

 

Waymo did not address the specific safety incidents but said it was "proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency."....

....MUCH MORE

 

What happened to the good old days when autonomous vehicles recognized their limitations? 

In 2015 - 2016 when everyone thought that autonomous driving was just around the corner, the challenge was seen as both a sensor issue, for example: LIDAR vs cameras, and a machine learning/artificial intelligence problem which boils down to training the AI 'puters with as much data as you can so that out in the real world the autonomous vehicle can say to itself: "Yeah, I've seen this situation before, here's the response that worked best. Both the training and the on-the-road-recall, if they are to be anywhere near efficient, require the fastest chips you can find. Tesla had a whole bunch of data from a few billion miles of actual driving for computers to train on, and, combined with Nvidia's fastest-in-the-world GPU chips, it was a match made in heaven.

Except it wasn't.

The challenge of autonomous driving on open roads alongside non-autonomous vehicles was bigger than anyone in that simple, optimistic time ever envisioned, even in their nightmares. Here's one example about Waymo from a 2017 post:

"When Google was training its self-driving car on the streets of Mountain View, California, the car rounded a corner and  encountered a woman in a wheelchair, waving a broom, chasing a duck. The car hadn’t encountered this before so it stopped and waited."

—Markets and Waterfowl: Machine Learning Is Only As Good As the Training It Receives