Robotaksi Waymo not quite ready to go on public roads

Robomobili production Alphabet holding, or rather one of its divisions, Waymo, may not be ready to exit on public roads. And this is despite the fact that the developers announced that the commercial launch of the robotaxi service will take place this year.

Robot cars are tested in test mode in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Residents of Phoenix are not too happy with the mobiles, claiming that they still have too many shortcomings for the service to be called complete. Among other problems are difficulties injecting traffic into the general traffic on the road, turning left and rounding off groups of people.

In this city, Waymo uses Chrysler Pacifica minivans as the main vehicle of its taxi service. The automatic machine control system acts as an “ideal driver”, observing all traffic rules, including those that people drivers do not always consider necessary to execute. For example, robomobili often stop on the track for three full seconds before the stop sign. Actually, there is nothing criminal in this, but the locals are not afraid of such behavior of robotic machines. Among residents, a survey was conducted about the attitude of residents to roaming vehicles. Many of them replied that they simply "hate them."
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Waymo representatives say the company was founded with the goal of making roads safer. That is why robomobili comply with all the rules of traffic rules, even those that can be considered redundant in some cases. Yes, and now testing machines with an automatic control system is underway, perhaps over time, some "lines of conduct" will be changed to more flexible ones.

As for the tests, Waymo is the leader among all the companies that deal with robots. Its robotaxi has already rolled over 10 million km on public roads, and over time this distance will only increase. But so far, robomobils in the most difficult cases act according to the instructions of remote operators. Specialists help machines with an automatic control system to act in cases where the computer cannot find a way out of a difficult situation on its own.

And here is a rather strange situation. On the one hand, Waymo claims that its vehicles are able to ride on the roads themselves, without any driver participation at all. On the other hand, company representatives admit that they still use the help of operators. Moreover, at first, even during paid trips, the operator will be present in the cabin, who will quickly solve difficult problems on the road, if they arise.

And by the way, not only Waymo plans to launch a robotaxi service soon. GM and Ford promise to do the same in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

According to Waymo spokesperson Ronnie Cohen, the weirdness of the car is nothing else, as a result of a more “attentive" attitude of the vehicle to the road. In other words, the robot computer notices much of what a human driver does not see. Analyzing this information, the machine acts on the basis of the current situation. It can calculate the speed of a passing car, determine the number of nearby vehicles, define a “window” that allows merging with the traffic flow. But all this takes time, so from the side of the robotaxi it may seem very slow.

In order to make the vehicle completely autonomous, that is, to increase its “robotization” to the fifth level, almost all companies that are engaged in the development of robotaxi will have to work, and a lot. Perhaps this is why Tesla Inc is not yet too eager to make its cars fully robotic, with an autonomy level of 4-5. Electric cars have reached the second level of autonomy and the company, and the owners of Tesla cars still have enough of this.

Waymo is actively working to improve its fourth level, when the car rolls on the roads on its own, but still under the supervision of the operator. On the other hand, if the computer has not yet learned how to make decisions promptly when merging with the main traffic flow, or it’s probably too early to talk about taxi service robotization.