Driverless Waymo Struggles With Cop’s Hand Signals
Traffic signs, traffic light signals and ground markings are one thing, but hand signals from police officers are another. Already a few days ago, police officers in Phoenix failed to break up a traffic jam caused by several Waymos because they apparently couldn’t follow hand signals, and so too in a new video. You can see, from the perspective of passengers in a driverless Waymo, a patrol officer getting off his motorcycle to use hand signals to tell the Waymo which direction to go. But the Waymo reacts hesitantly or not at all, much to the obvious frustration of the law enforcement officer.
But Waymos do know how to respond to hand signals, as a video taken seven years ago shows. Here, I was about to cross the street with a friend working at Waymo at the time when one of the Firefly vehicles drove by. My friend raised his hand in salute to his colleagues, but the car makes a short sharp braking before moving on.
With the growing number of robotaxis and robotaxi fleets, hand signals from authorized people are also becoming increasingly important. The British company Humanising Autonomy, for example, is dedicated to creating a gesture database for autonomous cars.
This article was also published in German.
