Waymo's autonomous driving technology navigates a police controlled intersection

It isn't necessary and the best example of this is Tesla's autopilot. It uses no Lidar component and Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human. He's been a long time anti lidar proponent because of the costs involved and the aesthetics. He's also betting that the amount of data Tesla receives from its customers, and the neural net they have can achieve autonomous driving with its current hardware stack. “In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of,” Musk said. He added, “Perhaps I am wrong, and I will look like a fool. But I am quite certain that I am not. "Despite being a fancy and expensive technology, LiDAR provides surprisingly little advantage over a combination of cameras and radar. Radar, for example, is much better in the rain and other limited visibility scenarios, because it is based on radio waves rather than light waves. Radio can penetrate through some objects and bounce back from others, thereby “seeing” the environment along a different dimension." an excerpt from a quora answer on why the Tesla stack could be better than Lidar: [link] Here's a video of Tesla's autopilot perceives its environment : [link] and here's a video of how Waymo perceives its environment: [this video] The question is if the Lidar adds incremental value or exponential value,

>As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand signals: [this video] . No reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with some improvements. This is an incredibly idealized version of "traffic cop" that doesn't exist in NYC. Here's an extremely well disciplined example of a traffic cop in NYC. They don't stand in one place, they are constantly challenged by traffic from all direction, they sometimes stop certain lanes, and tell other ones to go, with all sorts of gestures. And this is only a 4 way intersection without much traffic, and without any construction or significant pedestrian traffic. Its one thing to program an AI car that can drive under idealized, predictable conditions and entirely another to drive in the chaos of the real world, especially NYC. [link]