Google's self-driving cars learned an important lesson about driving near buses

Google recently taught its self-driving cars an important lesson about buses: They're less likely to yield.

That's the company's conclusion after one of its autonomous vehicles crashed into the side of public transportation bus in Mountain View, California, prompting it to make "refinements" to its software.

"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles," the company writes in its monthly autonomous vehicle report for February.

This was the first accident where Google admitted that its self-driving car was at fault, rather than the accident being caused by other human drivers.

The incident in question occurred on Valentine's Day after Google's car had followed the "social norm" of pulling to the rightmost side of its lane to prepare for a turn. However, the car discovered sandbags blocking its way in front of a storm drain, so it needed to merge back into the center of the lane. In slowly doing so, it hit the bus, according to the DMV traffic report Google about the crash.

Google says its test driver had allowed Google's car to make the move despite seeing the bus coming, because he or she expected the bus to slow or stop.

"This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day," Google writes.

The company says that it hopes that the refinements it made to its software will help it "handle situations like this more gracefully in the future."

Here's the full excerpt from the report:

Our self-driving cars spend a lot of time on El Camino Real, a wide boulevard of three lanes in each direction that runs through Google's hometown of Mountain View and up the peninsula along San Francisco Bay. With hundreds of sets of traffic lights and hundreds more intersections, this busy and historic artery has helped us learn a lot over the years. And on Valentine's Day we ran into a tricky set of circumstances on El Camino that's helped us improve an important skill for navigating similar roads.

El Camino has quite a few right-hand lanes wide enough to allow two lines of traffic. Most of the time it makes sense to drive in the middle of a lane. But when you're teeing up a right-hand turn in a lane wide enough to handle two streams of traffic, annoyed traffic stacks up behind you. So several weeks ago we began giving the self-driving car the capabilities it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane. This is the social norm because a turning vehicle often has to pause and wait for pedestrians; hugging the curb allows other drivers to continue on their way by passing on the left. It's vital for us to develop advanced skills that respect not just the letter of the traffic code but the spirit of the road.

On February 14, our vehicle was driving autonomously and had pulled toward the right-hand curb to prepare for a right turn. It then detected sandbags near a storm drain blocking its path, so it needed to come to a stop. After waiting for some other vehicles to pass, our vehicle, still in autonomous mode, began angling back toward the center of the lane at around 2 mph -- and made contact with the side of a passing bus traveling at 15 mph. Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it. (You can read the details below in the report we submitted to the CA DMV.)

Our test driver, who had been watching the bus in the mirror, also expected the bus to slow or stop. And we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put. Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day.

This is a classic example of the negotiation that's a normal part of driving -- we're all trying to predict each other's movements. In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn't moved there wouldn't have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that.

We've now reviewed this incident (and thousands of variations on it) in our simulator in detail and made refinements to our software. From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future.