[brigade]

They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation?

Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.

[kelnos]

> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm

That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!

A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.

[scarmig]

I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt?

Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at scale, AV should be able to handle them not just as well as humans do but much better.

[civilitty]

I think the answer is quite obvious: require self driving cars to have a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm that folds into the front of the car.

It can be used to remove traffic cones and clothesline cyclists!

[silisili]

If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!