At a press conference Saturday at the Thinkery, a children’s science museum, Austin Mayor Steve Adler said the self-driving cars fit well into the city’s technological scene. In preparation, the company has been testing the Lexus RX45oh SUV in the state to check its suitability to their first, fully self-driving vehicle. The company has patented a method by which self-driving cars can identify cyclists, and even understand their hand signals. Nope. Turns out the rider was simply doing a track stand – where they keep the bike upright at a stop without taking their feel off the pedals – and the auto couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. But, writes Oxtox, “I felt safer dealing with a self-driving vehicle than a human-operated one”.
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During a track stand, as seen above, a cyclist will often shift forward and back in small movements to balance without needing to put their feet on the ground.
So you probably know by now that Google has been working on a self-driving vehicle (and they are not the only ones). One such incident reportedly occurred earlier this month in Austin, when a robot vehicle was baffled by a man riding a fixed-gear bike (also known as a “fixie”, a favorite of so-called hipsters around the world), The Washington Post reports. It apparently detected my presence (it’s covered in Go-Pros) and stayed stationary for several seconds.
Google has chosen Austin to be its site for testing its first fully self-driving cars outside of California. In addition to these small movements, what likely contributed to the car’s confusion is the fact that during a track stand, the cyclist’s body position is basically the same as when they’re in motion. “Then as it began to move again, I had to rock the bike to maintain balance…it stopped abruptly”.
This happened for a few more times for the next 2 minutes, the cyclist starting, then stopping, while the car’s AI was stopping itself to avoid a crash, even if it had the legal right to go through the intersection. The two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to “teach” the vehicle something about how to deal with the situation.
The cyclist says he didn’t leave with a negative impression on Google’s cars.
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Maybe this is the reason why Google has wanted to test its self-driving cars in Austin, to check how it will interact with “unteachable” scenarios.
