After encountering trouble smoothly operating the cars in certain situations, such as four-way stops, the team has found that the management software must be programmed to behave more like a human driver than a robot.
“We found that we actually need to be — not aggressive — but assertive,” Nathaniel Fairfield, a technical leader involved in software development for the cars, told the San Jose Mercury News. “If you’re always yielding and conservative, basically everybody will just stomp on you all day.”
Engineers are also investigating how the cars can react in other scenarios that commonly involve body language or gestures by human drivers, posing additional challenges for a car that may not be capable of interpreting the waving hand of another motorist.
The report suggests Google is exploring driving strategies that are not quite aligned with California driving guidelines. On the highway, the cars are said to have been reprogrammed to reduce the following distance behind vehicles further ahead — consistent with most other drivers, but not with the state’s “three-second rule” that California recommends.
“If you follow too closely and another driver ‘cuts’ in front of you, just take your foot off the gas,” the California Driver Handbook says.
The company found that other drivers were dangerously cutting into the wide gap left between the self-driving car and the next vehicle ahead. Slowing down every time a car pulls into the 100-yard gap on a busy 70-mph highway can quickly bring the car into conflict with minimum-speed laws, suggesting Google is attempting to find a realistic compromise between two laws that are enforced subjectively by law enforcement.
The self-driving cars have already completed more than 700,000 miles around Google’s home town of Mountain View. The vehicles currently require extremely detailed maps of every road, however the company is working to make the technology ready for wider adoption as early as 2017.
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