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The Balls on Waymo to Launch a Philadelphia Testing Run After What Happened to HitchBOT
By Kyle Pagan
Published:
Waymo is coming to Philadelphia for a fall testing run:
How about the balls on Waymo? Do they not remember the headlines from the last time a robot tried to come into Philadelphia uninvited?
Here’s how Waymo tests out their technology in new regions:
Travel First, we bring a small fleet of vehicles equipped with the Waymo Driver to a new city, and sometimes, we return to cities we’ve visited before. Testing fleets are limited and closed to the public. Initially, human specialists drive these vehicles manually to help provide the Waymo Driver context of where it’s operating.
Drive Once the Waymo Driver understands the lay of the land, the vehicles can begin driving autonomously. During these trips, human specialists provide feedback to our engineering teams on the driving experience and flag unique nuances that might come with operating in new areas. Simultaneously, our engineering team can evaluate the Waymo Driver’s performance in a virtual replica of the new location to measure how it generalizes.
Apply Our teams use the new learnings and insights gathered during this time to continue refining the Waymo Driver’s capabilities and service experience. Driving in dozens of different cities over the years has helped inform the design and capabilities of our sensing technology, improve the Waymo Driver’s performance in the cities we already operate, and safely bring our technology to new places. With this applied learning/knowledge, we will progress even faster with each new place we bring the Waymo Driver, and eventually have fewer novel situations that we’ll have to teach the Driver to navigate. For example, our rain testing in Miami was instrumental in enabling us to serve riders fully autonomously in wet and rainy conditions in California and Phoenix.
Philadelphians are going to hate this if it makes it through testing and into a full launch. It took them years to trust getting into strangers’ cars even though taxis had been around for decades at that point. Now you want them to trust a driverless car? Not gonna happen. Some Eagles fans are gonna Tush Push this thing into the Skook.
But take this thing down to South Philly during an Eagles game and on 676 and I-95 during rush hour. If it can pass those tests then it should be good to go, and, honestly, with the way traffic is at the stadiums is going Waymo might pull itself out of Philadelphia altogether.
I took a Waymo in LA against my will. The friends that I was with totally sandbagged everyone. We thought they were calling an Uber and here pops up some robot that doesn’t need no man (literally there was no one in the car driving). I couldn’t get used to it. Don’t get me wrong, the tech was really good. We were driving roughly 20 minutes so I feel like we experienced almost everything you would on a typical drive in a major city. We were never in danger, but I still felt like we were always in danger if that makes sense. I could never get settled, even when the Waymo would flawlessly complete a maneuver like going into an oncoming lane to get around other cars double parked. Then again, I think I’m just a control freak because I criticize Uber drivers all the time. So if you’re like me this ain’t for you. Not to mention the what-if. Waymo has had its problems:
And I’ll tell you what, the last thing I want to do is talk to some nicey-nice customer service rep when my Waymo is on the fritz.
Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com