[techiferous]

Other edge cases include: Amish buggies, rotaries in Boston, Syracuse's upside down traffic light (green is on top), etc. The possibilities are endless; how can you test them all? Humans are really good about adapting to novel situations on the fly, not so much computers.

[neumann]

I mean, you are right about humans as a species, but oh god, not as drivers. As a cyclist commuter, pass/get passed by a lot of cars and see a lot of irregular/irrational behavior. Everytime there is a change in the traffic rules along my route (detour, construction, closed lane, new signalling) you will get a pretty high rate of people who either ignore the change, panic and drive recklessly, or panic and come to a confused stop.

Maybe we need driverless cars that can show panic faces when they don't know what to do and be coached by a friendly citizen what to do? It would be super cute.

[xnx]

Agree. It's a fun game to think up edge cases that would challenge a self-driving car. On average these cars will far outperform human drivers. I see human drivers blow through stop signs every day completely unaware that they did so.

[mantas]

Didn't Uber car did exactly that? Perfect robot would outperform average human. Sure. Average robot to average human? That's much more interesting...

[linuxftw]

An uber car also killed someone and the emergency automatic braking system was disabled.

[prawn]

Zoox has hinted that their vehicles will use sounds (at least) to signal intent and reactions.

[100ideas]

Chernikov tail lights

[100ideas]

One approach would be to record 100-to-1000 trials of how human drivers navigate each particular edge case in vehicles instrumented for autonomous driving.

Sadly, no one seems to have figured out a way to economically motivate human drivers to do this.

[eitland]

Isn't this part of what Tesla has been doing though? At least they sell cars that simultaneously has:

- human drivers in demanding situations

- sensor and compute package planned for autonomous driving

From there it is mostly a question of

1. getting permissions to collect the data

2. finding some efficient way to store -> sift for interesting situations -> magic happens here -> lots of regression testing -> self driving car -> profit!

I would think?

[glaberficken]

The problem are not the expected edge cases, but the unexpected ones. No amount of hard coded reactions are going to do for those.