The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can get new changes almost immediately.
I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.
Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching. I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
> Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching.
What does this mean? Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
> I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
I'm not sure what you mean. Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
Well, if your car brakes hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me. I’m not sure how to make this concept simpler so I can only repeat it.
> Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I know.
> I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
If you think in a discussion about robot cars that drive themselves being conducted on a hacker website, I’m suggesting that cars communicate their sensor data to each other by honking their horns, in really not sure what to tell you other than yes, this would be profoundly dim witted.
> I'm not sure what you mean.
I believe it.
> Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
I believe it. I also believe you’re deeply missing the point, perhaps intentionally.
Agreed, but having the raw data is still useful, especially for less-used routes where it's not economically feasible to send out dedicated mapping cars all the time.
I'm just speculating here, but I can envision a few ways of dealing with the cost problem in scaling an HD mapping-based robotaxi fleet:
1. Robotaxi companies might simply stand to make enough money to cover the cost of routine HD mapping. Anywhere the revenue of putting taxi services in a new city outweighs the cost of implementing the necessary updates sufficiently, won't companies do it? We could think of these companies as having similar economics to Uber, but replacing the cost of paying drivers with the cost of routine HD mapping updates.
2. Smaller towns have less frequent construction, so the update costs might be lower as you target less dense areas.
3. I could see a single company that specializes in providing routinely updated maps to a variety of fleet-operating companies. This could potentially be a utility or somehow subsidized by the government. It would also be possible for government to coordinate construction with HD mapping updates. After all, by lowering the rate of accidents and decreasing square footage devoted to cars, governments have a vested interest in seeing robotaxis replace human-owned and driven cars.
