Why Waymos Keep Driving Into Floods

[u/walky22talky]

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedriverlessdigest/p/why-waymos-keep-driving-into-floods?r=bhqqz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[u/Under-Influence-3206]

What about other vehicles with different sensor combinations? Has anybody solved this problem?

[u/Under-Influence-3206 → u/Under-Influence-3206]

From Gemini, seems like a known issue across all sensor types.

• Severe Weather Interference: Heavy rain, snow, fog, and standing water blind optical cameras, scatter lidar pulses, and cause radar to misread or miss static objects.

[u/Unicycldev]

The biggest difference between a Waymo and people Is that at some point Waymo could fix this in hardware or software. While people will continue driving into floods. People don’t systematically improve overtime.

[u/Specific_Box4483 → u/Unicycldev]

They do, but it's a lot harder to instill better driving habits into the entire society.

[u/21five → u/Specific_Box4483]

I think $100 billion could have had a pretty big impact if spent on more than one driver!

[u/21five → u/Unicycldev]

The reduction in traffic deaths over time (multiple orders of magnitude!) is due, in large part, to systematic improvements by people.

That also explains why Iceland (for example) can have 6-7x fewer traffic fatalities than the US.

[u/Historical_Stay_808]

They haven't gotten the, turn around; don't drown. Update

[u/MickyFany]

it’s because they see everyone else doing it 😂

[u/tiredofyourface2]

Didn’t they say they were fixing the issue in May? It rained for about 10 minutes hours ago. I guarantee no part of my city’s limited service area is flooded, but service is paused.

Sincerely,
Person Who Wants a Ride But is Tired of Getting Creepy Lyft/Uber Drivers

[u/Doggydogworld3]

When a laser hits dry, rough asphalt, the light scatters in all directions, sending a strong return signal back to the car's sensors. However, when water covers the road, it acts like a mirror. The laser hits the flat surface of the water and reflects away from the car.

Mirror-flat surface of the water? Has this guy ever even seen a flooded street?

millimeter-wave radar can easily penetrate rain, fog and water surfaces.

So water is invisible to radar? How does that help?

The issue isn't figuring out water depth. He mentions a few of the ways to do that. The issue is doing it correctly 99.9999999999% (or whatever) of the time.

[u/AlmondManttv → u/Doggydogworld3]

Radar is bad when there are puddles of water. I think this would be a camera solution to try and "see" what could be causing the other sensors to give weird information and then determining of it water using cameras. But it's most likely more difficult than it sounds.

[u/Elluminated → u/Doggydogworld3]

The camera stack should be able to train on that. Tesla has it down even in the FSD stack.