Cruise said in a regulatory filing to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it issued the software recall because of a “rare circumstance” in which self-driving systems cause driverless robo-taxi to operate unprotected The car braked sharply on a left turn and there was no human safety driver behind the car.
Cruise said in an emailed statement that it submitted the voluntary document to demonstrate transparency to the public, adding that it only addresses previous software releases and does not affect or change its current road reality. operating issue.
“The report explains how Cruise AV responded to a vehicle speeding in the wrong lane, and through our normal continuous improvement, Cruise AV is even better at preventing this single exceptional event,” the Cruise statement continued.
Cruise said there had only been one such incident in more than 123,560 unprotected left turns without a driver before the update was released, and now Cruise has installed a software update so it won’t happen again.
During the June 3 incident, an oncoming vehicle was travelling at 40 mph in a 25 mph restricted right-turn/bus-only lane while Cruise AV was carrying out a cruise, according to regulatory filings. Unprotected left turn. When the robo-taxi begins to turn left, the self-driving system predicts that the oncoming vehicle will turn right and go directly into its path. When the Cruise robo-taxi braked to avoid a collision, the oncoming vehicle pulled out of the right-turn lane and went straight through the intersection, colliding with the robo-taxi’s right rear body, the report said.
Cruise argues that the self-driving system had to decide between two different risk scenarios, and chose the one with the least likelihood of a severe collision at the time before an oncoming vehicle suddenly changes direction.
NHTSA launched a special, but not formal, investigation into the crash. NHTSA’s Special Crash Investigations program focuses on useful cases of special crash situations or outcomes from an engineering perspective.