One of the reports says that the accident was caused by the other driver looking at their phone. Could potentially the sensors of the waymo detect that and warn the other driver?
"Hey guys, self-driving is a decent sprint but I think you should expand the scope to include detecting and modeling driver behavior in nearby vehicles. Add a quick study for HCI to warn drivers of their dangerous aberrant behavior and I think we might have something real here!" - tropsis, 2023
It's doing that by looking at the vehicle as the agent though; it has nothing to do with "the body language of this pilot suggests this vehicle will do X", it's just a predictive module because it's useless to be able to see another car if you can't predict it's going to go X units forward in the next time tick(s).
Adding a layer that models human drivers to augment the prediction of this module you link would be a waste of time.
Lol. I think the other comment is making a suggestion that isn't quite reasonable, but maybe it's adjacent to a reasonable ask.
Humans have a horn to warn other humans of unsafe behavior or conditions. We really only need to worry about warning in front of us. And we provide some warning to cars behind us in specific cases with hazard lights and brake lights.
The autonomous vehicles have a better understanding of the whole state. We've already talked about warning other autonomous cars with V2V, but maybe there's something easy/sane they can do to warn human cars behind them and further increase safety.
I think dedicating a small team on this would be a reasonable thing to do. It should be quite separate from the main self-driving task, and would reduce the number of accidents.
In the end, if I'm in a self-driving car, I care whether the crash happened, not who caused it. The injuries and hassle are mine either way, the financial damage isn't mine either way.
I mean if the other driver is using Android it should be possible to use some combination of license plate, phone GPS, Bluetooth proximity, and other means to identify who the other driver probably is and pop a “you are about to run into one of our cars, please loop up” message on their phone.
Fun fact: while daily generally lies on the rear-ending driver, intentionally causing an accident will always get the lion’s share of blame. This would bankrupt Waymo, not anyone else.
If you do that kind of thing, don’t expect it to work out well if the other driver has a dashcam. If they don’t, of course you can lie and deny having caused the accident.