Fair enough. I'm sure some would be willing to do that, but likely not many. I do think it is going to be very interesting to work out some of the scenarios if we do get to Johnny Cab style self driving cars.
"By working with the police department in Chandler, AZ, for example, Waymo has been able to train its cars to yield, pull over, or stop when it hears or sees sirens." [1]
By what mechanism though? I could see a big griefing opportunity if there is some automated system that allows law enforcement to signal the vehicle to pull over.
Instead of recognizing the lights or something you could create a communication of some sort where the officer's vehicle provides a key that the car can then authenticate that it's a real police officer making the pull over request.
Heck you could even check with a police department system that the officer is on duty and in that area so a stolen police car or key couldn't be used.
Check out waymo's videos; the car detects the flashing lights + reflective fabric on the police officer's uniform, as well as the shoulder and arm gestures. Griefing is as much an issue as is police impersonation right now, that is a very rare occurence that will be punished very severely when occurring.
Have a look[1]. Observe how they all kind of look like each other regardless of the country: shoulder pads, head cover, belt, uniform colour, formal attire, etc. Once the model knows the baseline, that is "a uniformed individual waving characteristically in front of the car", don't you think it would be quite easy to teach it with a mere few hundred pictures how local police officers look like in the current region?
They don't look remotely similar to me, especially considering that black, blue, navy, grey and khaki (and reflective yellow for people on roads) are not unpopular colours for clothes worn by people who are not police officers or otherwise involved in traffic direction, many of whom may have cause to move their arms in ways comparable to signals. Humans are just a lot better at gauging intention and even simple stuff like parsing the word "police" at an oblique angle
Frankly even with local training, you'd still think giving law enforcement devices to stop, restart and redirect vehicles was a minimum requirement.
All of these agents follow a similar pattern of clothing (as I said, combination of similar garnments and colours) and behaviour (placement on the road, gesturing with authority, directly facing the car, etc.). Machine learning algorithms are especially good at recognizing patterns and storing their abstracted form, so it should come as no surprise that understanding what a police officer looks like in abstract is not the main issue of self driving.
> Humans are just a lot better at gauging intention and even simple stuff like parsing the word "police" at an oblique angle
Google seems to understand these intentions well enough, and at a much higher level than mere word parsing. This video is from 2015: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=9m5s
You got the car understanding all that happens at a complex intersection at 9'05, understanding what a police car looks like at 9'35, then detecting and reacting to a schoolbus and then parsing a police officer gestures right at the 10' mark. I'd say chances are these are pretty solved situations 3 years later. You can even see some creatures from their "zoo" of patterns for cars & people at 10'35.
> "When a Waymo car hears sirens, it will automatically pull over, yield, and stop. For example, when a number of vehicles are moving towards the scene of an accident on a highway and ambulances and other emergency vehicles are headed toward it, driverless cars will move aside and give way. Using audio sensors, the cars can detect exactly which direction the sirens are coming from and move out of the way."