[xiaolingxiao]

Multi-agent refers to behavior of pedestrians/cyclists, and other cars on the road. This is especially tough in "ambigous" junctions such as roundabouts, and unprotected left turns. There the strategy to negotiate the junctor is highly context dependent, and the information needed to find a strategy is not in the current scene. Drivers in these moments draw on "cultural awareness" of what "should" be done. Observing a history of what people do in these situations may not be sufficient because of the long tail of unique events, or at least unique in terms of how the computer will represent the scene. For example, if the scene is represented by the set of trajectories (or really waympoints), then the set of possibiilties is infinite. All of this assume the car "knows" it's entering and exiting a predefined scenario such as roundabout, real life driving is not so discrete.

On top of this, there's a liability and ethics issue. We accept teenagers for getting drunk and killing people, but we cannot accept an autonomous car that cannot navigate a roundabout which would otherwise be easy for a person, sober or otherwise.

[Fricken]

I have faith in robotaxis abilities to handle safety critical things. The lizard brain stuff is under control. They are still just too stupid to navigate complex traffic efficiently, without regularly hesitating and getting tripped up.

Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"

Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work. With perception and classification problems the robotics industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke. Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.

[travisporter]

Can you elaborate on the moving parts? Is it just too expensive to install/maintain the sensors, or do you mean the algorithm has to deal with multiple inputs/decisions?

I could envision a scenario where a city council of a less populated city with lax regulations could deploy robotaxis to their economic advantage. Do you think we'll get there soon?

[a_t48]

Not OP, but it's as much the algorithm having to deal with different inputs as the engineers having to build all the needed systems together.