As a human, we can hear the siren of an emergency vehicle approaching and take action (pull over, do not proceed into intersection etc) well before the emergency vehicle gets to us. How do autonomous vehicles such as those from Waymo/Cruise do this? Do they only take action when they “see” the blinking lights? Could a tow truck or other maintenance vehicle with orange blinking lights fool a autonomous vehicle into thinking it was an emergency vehicle?
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I use to work for Waymo before they became Waymo. Waymo vehicles actually listen and pick up the sound of the sirens sometimes before they even see it like we do. For example if a emergency vehicle is coming from the left side but it is unable to see it due to buildings, obstructions, etc, a warning symbol comes up on the system that it has detected emergency sirens, but it needs to see the flashing lights before it takes any action. Back in the day, the software really did not have any good way to deal with the emergency siren and remote people would take over the car to make it a) maneuver through traffic or b) make it pull over. Pretty sure nowadays, it can automatically pull over and probably still have people occasionally having to take over.
Each city/state/area uses a specific pattern for emergency lights. Waymo for example was fed this data for Arizona so no there was no way for a non-emergency vehicle tricking the self driving car to pull over.
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