I stumbled on the most hilarious cross-walk encounter between one of the these delivery bots and a Waymo in downtown phoenix.. it seems that neither was programmed (probably rightfully so) to take the initiative in the situation, so what ensued was a painfully drawn out exchange of agentic deference.

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thaumasiotes 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Interestingly, the solution to this problem in humans is that all humans have different individual aggressiveness levels. That works pretty well, but I would guess it won't be one of the first things that robot fleet operators try.

	▲	tanseydavid 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm vibe coding a "rock-paper-scissors" protocol for robots to be able to negotiate situations just such as this.
	▲	Marsymars 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Makes me think of https://www.thecut.com/2015/01/manslamming-manspreading-micr...
	▲	globular-toast 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The standard way to do it with machines is to use a bit of randomisation along with exponential backoff. It's been used for collision avoidance in network protocols for a long time.