A content creator with a stop sign on his t-shirt managed to stop Waymo’s robotaxis in their tracks in Arizona
- An Arizona content creator has made a t-shirt with stop sign to see what Waymo’s autonomous test vehicles will do.
- In a video, the company’s robotaxis can be seen stopping for the t-shirt on several occasions.
- The uploader suggests that the Waymo vehicle may be confusing him with a construction worker holding a rotating stop sign.
Companies that develop autonomous vehicles often refer to the unexpected scenarios encountered 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 in Arizona who recently discovered a fascinating way to trick Waymo’s autonomous test vehicles into stopping whenever he wants them to. Surprisingly, his method is low-tech: wearing a t-shirt with a good old stop sign printed on it.
Read: AI Can’t Think On Its Feet As Weird Situations Stump Self-Driving Cars
Carr recently posted a video apparently showing him stopping Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces by emerging from behind some parked cars and revealing his stop sign t-shirt. Although the autonomous test vehicle did stop, some commenters suggested that the vehicle may have thought Carr was stepping into traffic, meaning that the t-shirt wasn’t what caused the robotaxi to stop.
To see if that was the case, Carr tried again, this time showing the autonomous vehicle his stop-sign t-shirt from the sidewalk, and it appears 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, stopping in some scenarios, but not others. That may be because his t-shirt is likely less reflective as a real stop sign, making it a less convincing fake.
While these videos may seem a little embarrassing for Waymo, whose autonomous test vehicle struggles to pass a “test” that a human driver would easily be able to ace, this is actually a surprisingly nuanced experiment.
Carr believes that the autonomous vehicle may be confusing him with a construction worker holding a stop sign. Waymo did not immediately respond to our request for comment, but that seems like a very reasonable explanation, and it makes the AV’s decision to err on the side of caution seem a lot more sensible.
All the same, the test is a fine example of why edge cases are so hard to account for, and so difficult to design around.