A content creator with a stop sign on his t-shirt managed to stop Waymo’s robotaxis in Arizona
- An Arizona content creator made a stop sign T-shirt to see what Waymo’s autonomous test vehicles will do.
- In a video, the company’s robotaxis can be seen stopping several times for the T-shirt.
- The uploader suspects that the Waymo vehicle may be mistaking him for a construction worker holding a rotating stop sign.
Companies developing autonomous vehicles often refer to the unexpected scenarios that arise while driving as “edge cases.” As Waymo recently discovered, these unusual situations don’t always occur naturally.
Jason B. Carr is an eBike enthusiast and content creator from Arizona who recently discovered an intriguing way to get Waymo’s autonomous test vehicles to stop whenever he wants. Surprisingly, his method is low-tech: he wears a t-shirt with a good old stop sign on it.
Read: AI can’t think on its own as strange situations hamper self-driving cars
Carr recently posted a video that appears to show him stopping Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces by coming out from behind some parked cars and revealing his stop sign t-shirt. Although the autonomous test vehicle stopped, some commentators suggested that the vehicle may have believed Carr was about to slide into traffic, meaning the T-shirt was not the reason the robotaxi stopped.
To find out if that was the case, Carr tried again, this time showing the autonomous vehicle his stop sign T-shirt from the sidewalk, and it seemed to have worked. From the sidewalk, Waymo’s autonomous test vehicle still stops.
To really test the robotaxi, Carr wore his T-shirt at night to see if the test vehicle would stop. In the dark, the I-Pace was less consistent, stalling in some situations but not others. This may be because his t-shirt is likely to be less reflective than a real stop sign, making it a less convincing fake.
While these videos may seem a little embarrassing for Waymo, whose autonomous test vehicle is struggling to pass a “test” that a human driver could easily pass, it’s actually a surprisingly nuanced experiment.
Carr believes the autonomous vehicle may mistake him for a construction worker holding a stop sign. Waymo didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment, but that seems like a very reasonable explanation, and it makes the AV’s decision to play it safe seem a lot more sensible.
Still, the test is a good example of why edge cases are so difficult to account for and so difficult to work around.