Waymo Gets Green Light For Airport Service in San Francisco (theverge.com) 15
Waymo is now permitted to test its robotaxi service at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), a big win for the company as it seeks to expand its service area and tackle more popular, revenue-generating destinations. From a report: After years of back-and-forth negotiations, Waymo signed "Testing and Operations Pilot Permit" with SFO, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a release. Under the agreement, Waymo will roll out its service to SFO in three phases, including testing vehicles with a human driver, testing without a driver, and eventually beginning commercial service.
Waymo will start its tests with employees before eventually inviting members of the public to take trips to and from the airport. Pickups and dropoffs will initially take place at SFO's Kiss & Fly lot, which is accessible to the terminals via the AirTrain.
Waymo will start its tests with employees before eventually inviting members of the public to take trips to and from the airport. Pickups and dropoffs will initially take place at SFO's Kiss & Fly lot, which is accessible to the terminals via the AirTrain.
Whew! (Score:3)
Just in the nick of time. [slashdot.org]
Waymo pickup from tricky location? (Score:2)
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The app doesn't let you put your specific address in there?
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In my Waymo trips yeah I've had to game the system a little to get it closer to where I actually am. It feels like it has some baked in behavior to where it chooses to stop for pickup and dropoff, either for efficiency or traffic or something but to me it feels intentional.
I basically kept plugging on nearby areas with the pin and looked at where it was trying to stop. Some spots I could never get it stop closer than a block, easily the weakest area of the service. This was all around metro SF so other c
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I always have trouble with rideshare pickups from my apartment. I can plant an X where I want to be picked up but then this gets translated to an address on a neighbouring street that is not in my complex. I always have to send a clarifying message to the driver. This is challenging because I can't send it until the driver is assigned, which is when I'm rushing around trying to be ready in time. It would seem that Waymo might skip the step of converting to a human readable address. That might help. But if, it doesn't, texting the robot driving the car doesn't seem to be an option. Has anyone here tried to get a Waymo pickup from a similar tricky location?
It probably helps to use a ridesharing platform that doesn't use multiple map providers. If all your map data is from one source, you don't have these problems. It's when you start to mix multiple map providers that things go horribly and irreparably wrong, because the workarounds for one platform don't work on a different platform. Given that we're talking about Waymo, I assume Google Maps is used for everything, so I wouldn't expect those issues to occur. But no way to know without trying it at your s
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Why should they (unless one of the mapping services in question have maps that are horribly wrong), I ean you put an x on a map in the ao, that cgets translated into an lat,long coordinate of sufficient perquisition that gets transferred to whomever does the driving, Broblem should be solvedas geography is geography no matter what mapping service /satnav you use. What am I missing here?
What you're missing is that some of the mapping services have maps that are horribly wrong, and also that people store coordinates badly.
Case in point, I live in a mobile home park that's almost big enough to be its own zip code. If your entry system lets me put in the space number *and* uses Google Maps as the back end, you can find my home that way. But as far as I know, no other mapping company has the per-unit data that would be required to find my house by its house number. That's simply a level of
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If its tricky because of specifying the location its probably going to work, you can set a pin to your desired pickup location. If its tricky because of the area Waymo will currently do worse because it generally isn't going to do the stuff a human is going to get away with like double parking, blocking a hydrant etc. Teaching a robot to follow the rules is easy because robots really want rules to follow. If you follow all the rules in a complex traffic environment, its likely you won't do so well, other
Tesla (Score:2)
Tesla needs an answer to this, to keep their stock fraud going. Remember when robotaxi was going to justify Tesla's P/E being twenty times too high?
Moar techno robot dancing will fix it (Score:2)
Or was it rooftop solar, I forget.
Highway driving? (Score:3)
From what I can read, Waymo still doesn't yet plan to add highway driving to SFO pickups and dropoffs. So, the practical routes will all be close to the airport.
More importantly, the pickup location is at the SFO Kiss and Fly location near the rental car center. This allows Waymo to bypass the craziness of the terminals, which is where the self-driving cars might have problems dealing with haphazard traffic that is constantly crossing lanes and cutting other cars off, cars that may be parked for a while (where the cues about when the car will move are more obvious to a human driver), airport security personnel directions, and impatient human drivers. This is the type of traffic that requires far more training data than road traffic and is extremely challenging to validate because the set of potential situations is so large.
I tried one in SF downtown... (Score:2)
It was an interesting experience, just out of curiosity. A few highlights:
- it seemed to max out at about 20mph on my ride, but that seems to be so that it could time the lights well and not have to stop/slow down
- a car backed out of a parking lot and directly in front of us. The Waymo stopped, honked, and when the car kept backing up it quickly reversed. A human driver would have been hit (seriously)
- but, I also seem to think that the driver backing up did so because they knew they could "bully" the W
Project: Centralize all Wealth in U.S. (Score:2)
hell (Score:2)
It is going to be hell on wheels at SFO. If you think SFO was bad before...