A widespread power outage in San Francisco that led to Waymo robotaxis blocking traffic earlier this month has raised concerns about the readiness of autonomous vehicle operators to handle major emergencies such as earthquakes and floods.
Driverless taxis from Waymo, a ubiquitous feature on the city’s streets, were stuck at intersections with their hazard lights turned on as traffic lights stopped working following a fire at a PG&E Corp substation that knocked out power to roughly one-third of the city on Dec. 20, videos posted on social media showed. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet Inc, halted operations, resuming a day later.
The incident has renewed calls for stricter regulation of the nascent but fast-growing industry as other companies, including Tesla Inc and Amazon.com Inc’s Zoox, race to expand robotaxi services in several cities.
“If you get a response to a blackout wrong, regulators are derelict if they do not respond to that by requiring some sort of proof that the earthquake scenario will be handled properly,” Carnegie Mellon University computer-engineering professor and autonomous-technology expert Philip Koopman said.
Robotaxi operators across the globe use remote access by humans — known in the industry as “teleoperation” — in varying degrees to monitor and control vehicles. Waymo, for example, has a team of human “fleet response” agents who respond to questions from the Waymo Driver, the bot driving the vehicle, when it encounters a particular situation.
Such remote assistance has its limitations, and the Waymo outage highlights the need to regulate how robotaxi operators use the technology, said Missy Cummings, director of the George Mason University Autonomy and Robotics Center and former adviser to the US road safety regulator.
“The whole point of having remote operations is for humans to be there when the system is not responsive in the way it should be,” she said.
“The federal government needs to regulate remote operations,” Cummings said. “They need to make sure that there’s backup remote operations when there’s some kind of catastrophic failure.”
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulate and issue permits for the testing and commercial deployment of robotaxis, have said they are looking into the incident.
The DMV said it was talking to Waymo and other autonomous vehicle makers about actions related to emergency situations. It also said it was formulating regulations to ensure remote drivers “meet high standards for safety, accountability and responsiveness.”
Robotaxis have returned to the spotlight as Tesla began service in Austin, Texas earlier this year as CEO Elon Musk promises rapid expansion. Waymo, which has grown slowly and steadily over the years since its launch as Google’s self-driving project in 2009, has accelerated expansion.
Cummings and Koopman said robotaxi operators should face additional permitting requirements once their fleets grow beyond a certain size to ensure that they have adequate capabilities to deal with large-scale failures.
“If this had been an earthquake, it would have been a problem,” Koopman said. “This is just a shot across the bow.”
NEW IDENTITY: Known for its software, India has expanded into hardware, with its semiconductor industry growing from US$38bn in 2023 to US$45bn to US$50bn India on Saturday inaugurated its first semiconductor assembly and test facility, a milestone in the government’s push to reduce dependence on foreign chipmakers and stake a claim in a sector dominated by China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened US firm Micron Technology Inc’s semiconductor assembly, test and packaging unit in his home state of Gujarat, hailing the “dawn of a new era” for India’s technology ambitions. “When young Indians look back in the future, they will see this decade as the turning point in our tech future,” Modi told the event, which was broadcast on his YouTube channel. The plant would convert
‘SEISMIC SHIFT’: The researcher forecast there would be about 1.1 billion mobile shipments this year, down from 1.26 billion the prior year and erasing years of gains The global smartphone market is expected to contract 12.9 percent this year due to the unprecedented memorychip shortage, marking “a crisis like no other,” researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said. The new forecast, a dramatic revision down from earlier estimates, gives the latest accounting of the ongoing memory crunch that is affecting every corner of the electronics industry. The demand for advanced memory to power artificial intelligence (AI) tasks has drained global supply until well into next year and jeopardizes the business model of many smartphone makers. IDC forecast about 1.1 billion mobile shipments this year, down from 1.26 billion the prior
People stand in a Pokemon store in Tokyo on Thursday. One of the world highest-grossing franchises is celebrated its 30th anniversary yesterday.
Zimbabwe’s ban on raw lithium exports is forcing Chinese miners to rethink their strategy, speeding up plans to process the metal locally instead of shipping it to China’s vast rechargeable battery industry. The country is Africa’s largest lithium producer and has one of the world’s largest reserves, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Zimbabwe already banned the export of lithium ore in 2022 and last year announced it would halt exports of lithium concentrates from January next year. However, on Wednesday it imposed the ban with immediate effect, leaving unclear what the lithium mining sector would do in the
RSS