My thinking here is that Waymo has logged hundreds of millions of miles at this point (and even more in sim), and there are a lot of nines in their safety record. So even the rare edge cases should have come up. You make a good point that the deep water scenario may be not only rare, but also under-represented in the training data. On the other hand, you'd think they would have thought to explicitly train for it; it's not that obscure of a possibility.
Ya, this does strike me as pretty high on the list of the thing I'd intentionally seek out if I was doing this job, along with object-in-the-road, icy road, tornado/hurricane, wildfire, and perhaps hail.
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My thinking here is that Waymo has logged hundreds of millions of miles at this point (and even more in sim), and there are a lot of nines in their safety record. So even the rare edge cases should have come up. You make a good point that the deep water scenario may be not only rare, but also under-represented in the training data. On the other hand, you'd think they would have thought to explicitly train for it; it's not that obscure of a possibility.
Ya, this does strike me as pretty high on the list of the thing I'd intentionally seek out if I was doing this job, along with object-in-the-road, icy road, tornado/hurricane, wildfire, and perhaps hail.