It's a QA department. If there is a failure hot spot, then take a bunch of known "good" QA drivers through that area. Assign strong weight to their performance/route/etc.
It's interesting reading through all this, I can see a review procedure checklist:
- show me how you take hotspot information into account
- show me how your QA department helps direct the software
- show me how your software handles the following known scenarios (kids, deer, trains, deer weather)
- show me how you communicate uncertainty and requests for help from the driver
- show me if there is plans for a central monitoring/manual takeover service
- show me how it handles construction
Also, construction absolutely needs to evolve convergently with self driving. Cones are... ok, but some of those people leaning on shovels need to update systems with information on what is being worked on and what is cordoned off.
No. If the car cannot handle random obstructions and diversions without external data, it cannot be allowed on the road.
Construction is often enough planned ahead of time, but crashes happen, will continue to happen, and if a SDC can't handle being routed around a crash scene without someone having updated some cloud somewhere, it shouldn't be allowed to drive.
First responders need to deal with the accident, not be focused on uploading details of the routing around the crash before they can trust other cars to not blindly drive into the crash scene because it was stationary and not on a map.
And if you can handle that on-car, which I consider a hard requirement, then why not simply use that logic for all the cases involving detours and lane closures?
Doing so ahead of time for planned construction is not a big ask.
"And if you can handle that on-car, which I consider a hard requirement, then why not simply use that logic for all the cases involving detours and lane closures?"
You're making the same mistake Musk made when insisting that the car be able to navigate regardless of location or connectivity. Ignoring the ability of networking/radio broadcast/internet databases to provide vastly more deep information pools is a big mistake.
It's far from clear, in practice, if they're actually doing this. If they have, it would have to be fairly recent, because the list of "Oh, yeah, Autopilot always screws up at this highway split..." is more or less endless.
GM's Supercruise relies on fairly solid maps of the areas of operation (mostly limited access highways), so it has an understanding of "what should be there" it can work off and it seems to handle the mapped areas competently.
But the problem here is that the learning requires humans taking over, and telling the automation, "No, you're wrong." And then being able to distill that into something useful for other cars - because the human who took over may not have really done the correct thing, just the "Oh FFS, this car is being stupid, no, THAT lane!" thing.
And FSD doesn't get that kind of feedback anyway. It's only with a human in the loop that you can learn from how humans handle stuff.