A month ago, a video circulated on social media of a Waymo robot stuck in a roundabout — an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo.
Apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing.
Around the same time, in another Waymo robot headed to the Phoenix airport, Mike Johns, founder and CEO of AI consultancy Digital Mind State, also found himself circling a parking lot, unable to stop the car or come out
The videos were posted within days of each other. Waymo has not confirmed whether the incidents happened at the same time or if there have been other similar incidents, but it says it has released software updates to fix the problem.
Johns was stuck in the Waymo going through a loop for “under seven minutes,” but he says it “seemed like forever,” especially after he feared he’d miss his flight and wondered if the car had been hacked. It was his second time in a Waymo robotax.
A Waymo spokesperson confirmed the incident. “This event occurred in early December and has since been addressed by a regularly scheduled software update. The vehicle completed the rider’s journey and they were not charged for the journey.”
A Waymo customer support specialist entered the car without prompting from Johns, he told TechCrunch. The agent said she received a tip that his car “may be experiencing some road issues,” according to a video of the incident shared by Johns.
To fix the problem, the technician asked Johns to open his Waymo app and “tap ‘My Trip’ in the lower left corner of the app,” to which Johns replied, “You can’t? You have to be able to handle it, take charge of the car, you don’t need my phone.”
A fair question to ask, since that kind of pickup is supposedly what a remote assistant is for.
“I don’t have an opportunity to check the car,” she confessed.
Waymo tells TechCrunch that its rider support agents are separate from its fleet response team, which is what the autonomous driving software (known as “Waymo Driver”) taps for help if it encounters a crash situation. unknown on the street.
Rider support agents, like the one Johns spoke with, can respond to contacts from drivers — riders can reach out through the Waymo app and an in-vehicle call button. They can also “initiate contact if Waymo vehicle diagnostics indicate such a need.” But they do not interact directly with the driving software.
In the end, Johns says, by following the support agent’s instructions in the app, the robotaxi got back on course.
Johns said Waymo reimbursed him for the trip and directed him to its website to file a complaint. The company did not contact him immediately after the incident, but did so this week after his video was picked up by mainstream media.
“My biggest thing is in this digital age that we’re in, we’re so disconnected from the human factor,” Johns told TechCrunch. “I’m all for AI. I’m at the forefront of AI, automation, robotics, but there’s still a human factor.”
Missy Cummings, a professor of autonomy and robotics at George Mason University and former senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says this incident, while small, points to a larger issue that AV companies need to address. solve you.
“In any robotic system, there’s a big red button somewhere that, if pressed, the thing will disconnect,” Cummings told TechCrunch, noting that the button could be hidden somewhere in the machine where it’s hard to reach. “And I will tell you that this is a really important security measure going forward, because what happens if the car … is hacked by somebody and there’s a passenger inside the vehicle? You definitely need the ability to remotely stop everything in the car so they can get out.”
Waymo told TechCrunch that, in fact, “Waymo vehicles have a tow button available to drivers at all times,” located in the app and on the passenger display, but Johns said the support agent didn’t tell him about it, and he didn’t see it.
Cummings also noted that requiring the rider to be an active participant in regulation using their app is “error-prone” due to potential connectivity issues and user-unfriendly apps.
“I was just amazed that she was trying to get him to get on his phone to come up with a solution to this when this is clearly an urgent situation that needs to be addressed immediately,” Cummings said. She should have said, ‘Look, pull the left corner of the carpet to the floor and you’ll see a red button. Press that button.”
