The machines are fighting.
Friendly Fire
A video shared on social media appears to depict the prelude to an inter-robot-species conflict. The belligerents? A Waymo robotaxi and a Serve Robotics delivery robot, according to TechCrunch.
The footage, taken in Los Angeles from a dashcam, shows the Serve robot puttering along a crosswalk at night before stopping in front of a curb on the opposite side of the street, taking a moment to adjust itself so it can roll up the small ramp to get onto the sidewalk.
Then a Waymo cab comes careening around the corner, T-boning the delivery bot right as it was making its final push. The fates, it seems, were feeling cruel that day.
Curb Stomp
Or were they? As it turns out, the impact wasn’t too severe. The Waymo cab, to its credit, hit the brakes immediately and avoided knocking the poor little thing over. And moments later, while the robotaxi is still in a daze, the Serve robot drives away like nothing happened.
Maybe it was fleeing guiltily. According to the person who shot the video, the Serve robot had run a red light moments before getting hit by the robotaxi.
Still, you’d expect the Waymo cab to be on the lookout for such cases. Pedestrians will often cross the street regardless of what the light indicates, as any urban drivers know.
The problem, apparently, was that the Serve robot wasn’t a pedestrian. Waymo told TechCrunch that its driver system had seen the delivery bot and correctly identified it as an inanimate object — and such is the disdain the autonomous vehicle harbors towards its Fellow Robot — so it didn’t exercise the level of caution it would around human beings as it’s programmed to do.
When the delivery bot unexpectedly stopped before the curb as the Waymo cab was rounding the intersection, it was too late to avoid a collision entirely. But Waymo says the driver system was able to apply hard braking before impact, so it only hit the Serve robot at four miles per hour.
Crisis Averted
Since both parties came out relatively unscathed, there probably won’t be a lot of complications from the incident. But it could have easily resulted in a much thornier situation, and is a preview of difficult questions surrounding the liability for machine employees as more robots, fully autonomous or otherwise, hit the streets.
What if serious damage had occurred? Which robot, and which company, would be to blame? And if humans were in the loop, what share of the blame would they hold?
In this case, Serve told TechCrunch that the robot was under remote human supervision at the time. The Waymo was driving autonomously with no passengers on board, but it’s unclear if remote teleoperators were alerted to the accident or took over following the collision.
More on robotaxis: Hilarious Video Shows Waymo Self-Driving Taxi Stuck in Roundabout