Name: Testing Self-Driving Cars in the Real World
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To test self-driving cars without putting lives at risk, most companies do a lot of their training in environments they can fully control. But ultimately, the only way to know how a car will perform on public roads is to test it in the real world.

Driverless cars are being tested in private and public spaces.

Testing Self-Driving Cars in the Real World

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To test self-driving cars without putting lives at risk, most companies do a lot of their training in environments they can fully control. But ultimately, the only way to know how a car will perform on public roads is to test it in the real world.

Driverless cars are being tested in private and public spaces.

Tech & Engineering

Testing Self-Driving Cars in the Real WorldPublished: October 23, 2019Onscreen: To test self-driving cars without putting lives at risk, most companies do a lot of their training in environments they can fully control, like this private training facility in Northern California.It’s run by Waymo, the company that Google spun off to develop self-driving cars.Stephanie Villegas: And so, because the site has so many different types of roads, from residential to expressways to arterial roads going between the two, cul-de-sacs and things like that, we’re able to stage, basically, an infinite number of scenarios that you would encounter on those types of roads in the real world.Tony Kum: Great! Let’s go for run, three, two, one…Narrator: Today’s test: on a street where the view is blocked, a car suddenly backs out into the Waymo car’s path.Kum: Great job, everyone.Villegas: We can go a little spicier. We can change the speed at which the auxiliary vehicle exits the driveway. Does it rip out of its driveway like a bat out of hell, really coming out of the driveway ahead of the Waymo vehicle? Or is it slowly kind of meandering down the driveway and taking its time?Kum: Great job, guys. Let’s restage and stand by.Narrator: Next, the Waymo car has to handle what’s called a “pinch point,” a two-way street made narrow by parked cars.Gunjan Yagnik: Waymo rolling.Villegas: You encounter this really often on public roads, two oncoming vehicles have to negotiate who will assume the right of way and who will have to yield.Narrator: The other car arrives at the pinch point first, so the software should tell the autonomous car to yield.Yagnik: Yielding, yielding right here. Butter going around. [sings] Butter…Narrator: These are just two of the thousands of scenarios the company uses to train the software, and they introduce new ones all the time.But ultimately, the only way to know for sure how a car will perform on public roads is to test it in the real world, where the stakes for wrong decisions are much higher.Shai Shalev-Shwartz: We don’t just, “Let’s go for a test drive just for the, for the fun of it,” because a test drive by itself may be dangerous, okay? But there are things that are very difficult to check without actually doing a test drive. And these are things that involve negotiation with other drivers, because in order to check if you are negotiating normally and properly with other drivers, you need other drivers.Narrator: Today, Mobileye engineers are testing a part of their planning software that handles merging in traffic.Amnon Shashua: So, so we merged fine, but at the last point we’re a bit slow.Merging into traffic, this multi-agent game that we are playing, requires sophisticated negotiation. You are negotiating. Your motion signals to other road users your intent, so you are negotiating. And this negotiation requires skills, and those skills don’t come naturally. Those skills need to be trained.You need to now change two lanes, because the exit is a few hundred meters from us.Narrator: The software is trained to be assertive when it has to be. Here, the car signals its intention to exit by speeding up so it can merge.Shashua: And you saw that we changed two lanes without obstructing the flow of traffic and there are many vehicles here. You need to provide agility that is as good as humans, if you want to be safe.

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Testing Self-Driving Cars in the Real World

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Support Provided By

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