Cruise fender bender with San Francisco metropolis bus results in software program replace

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company majority-owned by GM, notified the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration of a recall of its 300 self-driving vehicles after a fender flare in San Francisco. The autonomous Chevrolet Bolt, traveling about ten miles an hour, braked too late after a San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority articulated bus — the kind with two solid cars connected by a hinged accordion section — pulled up in front of the car and stopped . In papers filed with the government agency and in a blog post on Cruise’s website, Cruise leader Dan Vogt wrote that “the collision was caused by an issue related to predicting the unique movements of articulated vehicles under rare circumstances.” such as question and tractor trailer.

The accident happened on March 23. There were no casualties and only moderate damage to the Bolt’s front. Cruise engineers investigated the issue and conducted their software recall on March 25th – which meant releasing an OTA update, that’s all.

The bus wasn’t to blame. We were told that the self-driving software took the entire bus into account as the bus pulled out of a stop in front of the vehicle. However, since the articulated front end appeared first as the rear section of the bus pulled out, the software processed “the expected behavior of the previously blocked front section of the bus” and “since the AV had previously seen the front section and recognized that it was moving the bus could flex, it predicted the bus would move as connected parts, with the rear part following the predicted path of the front part.” The software did issue the stop command, but too late, hence the bumper car moment.

The self-driving cruise vehicles only operate in certain areas of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., but it is certain that they have had countless interactions near and around articulated buses. Vogt wrote, “Fender bends like this rarely happen to our AVs, but this incident was unique.” Autonomous industry observers call this type of incident a “borderline case,” the rare traffic incident that a human knows how to handle but is difficult or impossible to program until it occurs. This is how the errors are found.

San Francisco authorities don’t like the technique, however. Cruise and competitor Waymo plan to expand, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority petitioned the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in January to deny any expansion after dealing with “92 unique incidents affecting the city between May 29 and 2019.” were reported by December 31st. 2022.”

Vogt wrote in his post on the Cruise website: “We will no doubt continue to discover ways in which we can improve. … These continuous improvements are likely to make voluntary recalls commonplace. We believe this is one of the great advantages of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs can improve rapidly, and we’re able to carefully monitor that progress over time.”