Skip to main content

How GM’s Cruise self-driving cars navigate around double-parked vehicles

How Cruise Self-Driving Cars Navigate Double-Parked Vehicles
For self-driving cars, learning the rules of the road is just the beginning. Cars can be programmed to acknowledge stop signs and obey speed limits, but it’s much harder to account for the unpredictability of human drivers. Double-parked cars are a common sight in most cities, so General Motors’ Cruise autonomous-driving division is teaching its prototype self-driving cars how to navigate around them.

Before it can do anything, a self-driving car needs to figure out whether a vehicle in front of it is double parked. To do this, the car can use “contextual cues,” such as the appearance of hazard lights, or the amount of time a vehicle has been stationary, according to a Cruise blog post. Self-driving cars can also recognize if the vehicle in front is a type that tends to double park frequently, such as a delivery truck. Cruise’s cars rely on cameras, radar, and lidar to “see” what’s around them, and machine learning to synthesize information into a conclusion. Human beings do this all the time, but it’s something autonomous cars must be painstakingly taught.

A self-driving car can’t just sit behind a double-parked vehicle indefinitely. A human driver would simply look to see if there was a clear path and drive around the stationary vehicle, but a self-driving car’s control software must break that action down to its discrete parts. Algorithms consider everything from the potential actions of other road users, to how quickly the car will respond to control inputs. Cruise uses what it calls a “model predictive control” algorithm to try to chart how the situation around the car may change, and how the car is expected to react to a given command.

Cruise does most of its testing in San Francisco, providing a more challenging environment than some other popular testing locations. That exposes Cruise’s test cars to more difficult scenarios, giving engineers more opportunities to improve the autonomous-driving tech. But it also shows just how complicated it is to get a self-driving car to respond to a scenario most human drivers can easily figure out. Cruise parent GM hopes to put large fleets of autonomous cars on the road within the next few years, but getting the tech to work everywhere may take much longer.

Editors' Recommendations

Stephen Edelstein
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
Autonomous cars confused by San Francisco’s fog
Waymo Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV

Driving in thick fog is a big enough challenge for humans, but it turns out self-driving cars find it pretty tricky, too.

Overwhelmed by dense fog in San Francisco early on Tuesday morning, five of Waymo’s fully driverless vehicles suddenly parked by the side of a residential street in what appeared to be a precautionary measure, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Another of its cars apparently came to halt in the middle of the street, the news outlet said.

Read more
GM plans to phase out Apple CarPlay for EVs, go all-in on Android integration
Interior of the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV.

General Motors plans to stop using Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone connectivity in future EVs in favor of infotainment systems developed with Google based on the company's tech. First reported by Reuters, the move is surprising given the popularity of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which allow users to project content from smartphones onto a car's touchscreen, bypassing the native infotainment systems.

GM's decision to stop offering these systems on future EVs, starting with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, could help the automaker capture more customer data, Reuters noted, providing insight into how vehicles are used. But it will likely be detrimental to the user experience, as customers will have to learn to use built-in infotainment systems, rather than the smartphone interfaces they're used to.

Read more
Cruise’s robot taxis head to Arizona and Texas
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

Cruise’s autonomous cars are heading to Texas and Arizona before the end of this year.

The General Motors-owned company plans to launch ridesharing pilots in Austin and Phoenix in what will be its first expansion of the service outside of San Francisco.

Read more