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An autonomous vehicle's ability to stop at a boundary it cannot see is one of the harder unsolved problems in the sensor stack.
Last month, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi drove into an active emergency fire scene clouded with heavy smoke, and Amazon's robotaxi unit has since issued a software recall.
The mechanism is sensor degradation under obscurant conditions.
Cameras and lidar, the primary sensing layers in most autonomous systems, lose fidelity in smoke-heavy air: lidar returns scatter off particulates, camera sight lines compress.
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