"Instead, many of the vehicles requested a "confirmation check" from Waymo's fleet response team to make sure what they were doing is correct. All Waymo robotaxis have the ability to make these confirmation checks. With such a wide-spread outage on Saturday, there was a "concentrated spike" in these confirmation requests, Waymo said, which helped create all the congestion caught on video."
"Waymo said it built this confirmation request system "out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment" but that it is now refining it to "match our current scale." "While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the [self-driving software] with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively," the company wrote."
"The software update will add "even more context about regional outages" to the company's self-driving software. Waymo also said it will improve its emergency response protocols by "incorporating lessons from this event." While a lot of focus has been placed on the instances where Waymo's robotaxis got stuck during the power outage, the company shared that its vehicles "successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday.""
Waymo is shipping a software update to help its robotaxis navigate disabled traffic lights more decisively during power outages. The current system treats dead signals as four-way stops, but many vehicles requested confirmation checks from fleet response during a widespread blackout, causing a concentrated spike in requests and intersection congestion. Waymo built the confirmation system early as a safety measure and is now refining it to match current scale. The update will add regional outage context to the self-driving software and improve emergency response protocols. The fleet still traversed more than 7,000 dark signals that day.
Read at TechCrunch
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