Shouldn't a self-driving car always be passively looking for red lights?
I mean, take a school bus for instance. They don't have permanent red-light fixtures, but if you're behind them they could enable the red light sign at any moment. If the self-driving car isn't always looking wouldn't that be an issue?
What about the case the stoplight stops functioning? This happens many times. Recently late at night in Flushing NY crew was working on replacing switches on the stoplight and that caused outage so the Department of Transportation actually have asked the police department to send out officers to help direct traffic. Yeah, good luck with that if we are running self-driving car.
Why? Two things could happen here: The self-driving car could recognize hand gestures. Or the police could carry a simple radio transmitter device which would transmit directions to the self-driving cars (while also making gestures for human-driven cars). This is hardly some insurmountable problem.
Self-driving car needs to adapt to the world; if police need a special device to communicate with the car, the car is unsafe and should be banned from public roads.
So the enormous benefits of self-driving cars (many saved lives, mobility for people who cannot drive, reduced costs) should be prevented because we cannot equip police with a few radio transmitters? -- Assuming that is even needed, because Waymo's cars can recognize gestures made by cyclists already, so it's hardly a stretch to imagine them recognizing gestures made by policemen.
It's not just a matter of equipping police. Police are not the only people who occasionally need to make gestures that need to be recognized by cars: think construction workers in a crowded city, parking lot attendants, or anyone at the scene of an accident.
The car needs to be able to communicate with people outside of it, or it needs to have a human inside who can drive it.
Because I don't want my car stopping when a panhandler/hitchhiker/etc is trying to wave me down, this is actually a much more complicated problem than simply recognizing gestures.
It think it's more pragmatic than that. If Kansas doesn't want to equip their police with transmitters, then transmitters simply won't happen. It's a political problem which is much thornier than technical problems. I'm sure you could already apply that rubric today : If only government agency X would implement simple technology Y, everyone's life would be easier. In the real world, that fails to happen all the time.
Self driving cars are probably just going to have to recognize hand signals. That's simply the reality.
I don't think the transmitter option is viable until there's a critical mass of self-driving cars that all agree on the same communications protocol. And, as we all know, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
That is really interesting if true. Do you have any idea where you read it? I am genuinely interested; this is not some backhanded way of saying "citation needed."
Do you work in the field? I'm a bit skeptical about that. Waymo's self-driving car seems to do pretty well with things that aren't encoded in maps like road works and unexpected obstacles. I don't see why red lights would be exceptionally challenging to detect.
Forget if you're behind a school bus as I'd hope it would stop for any vehicle stopping in front of it. If you're on a normal rural highway (i.e. one with two but oppositely travelling lanes) and a school bus which is coming towards you makes a stop, you must stop so that any exiting kids can safely cross the street to their homes. What happens when a school bus makes a stop and the car decides to keep rolling through the bus's displayed and flashing red stop sign?
Fairly sure (though it likely depends on geographic location laws) that no matter your lane you need to stop if a bus displays its stop sign and lights, because, like you said, kids might try crossing the street at any time/place. So a self-driving car might be a lane or two away from the bus (not directly behind it) and still need to know to stop.
The exact rules do depend on the area. Where I am you always have to stop behind a bus on your side in any lane, but traffic on the other side does not have to stop if there are 4+ lanes.
Much of the material I studied for my learners permit written test has since become just part of how I drive (I hope), but the rules regarding stopping for school-busses have always stuck with me for some reason.
In Florida, the rule is that all traffic going in either direction must stop, except when the road is "a divided highway with an unpaved space of at least 5 feet, a raised median, or a physical barrier"[0], in which case the opposing traffic does not have to stop. It's interesting to me to see how little things like this change from place to place, and how these localized rules will be handled by self-driving vehicles.
I mean, take a school bus for instance. They don't have permanent red-light fixtures, but if you're behind them they could enable the red light sign at any moment. If the self-driving car isn't always looking wouldn't that be an issue?