Waymo said the self-driving system in its robotaxis treats dead stop lights as four-way stops, just like humans are supposed to. That should have allowed the robotaxis to operate normally in spite of the massive outage.
Waymo said it built this confirmation request system “out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment” but that it is now refining it to “match our current scale.”
“While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the [self-driving software] with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively,” the company wrote.
The software update will add “even more context about regional outages” to the company’s self-driving software. Waymo also said it will improve its emergency response protocols by “incorporating lessons from this event.”
While a lot of focus has been placed on the instances where Waymo’s robotaxis got stuck during the power outage, the company shared that its vehicles “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday.”
“Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology,” the company wrote.
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