The update corrects an error in the software that “assigned a low damage score” to the telephone pole
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Waymo vehicle was driving to a passenger pickup location through an alley that was lined on both sides by wooden telephone poles. The poles were not up on a curb but level with the road and surrounded with longitudinal yellow striping to define the viable path for vehicles. As it was pulling over, the Waymo vehicle struck one of the poles at a speed of 8mph
It seems the vehicle treated the polls as road debris, etc. This is the plastic bag dilemma. Do you treat something you don’t recognize as a sacred object that must be avoided, or drive through it. This comes up a lot with machine learning based identification of objects - everything is given a percentage of assurance of its identity and nothing is ever 100% guaranteed. That’s a statistical property. Also, every item must have a closely related set of images to model that object in that situation. In this case, a bunch of telephone polls with yellow striping around them seem to have confused the car.