Ford and Argo embrace a steep self-driving learning curve in Miami

Miami's roads are a mess. Tourists are unsure where to turn. Senior citizens plod along at speeds which defy physics. Local motorists blend an assortment of international driving styles. Congestion snakes along major arterials. New construction hazards spring up at a moment's notice.

This chaos, it turns out, is exactly why Ford Motor Co. has plunged headlong into testing the mettle of its autonomous-driving technology on Miami's streets.

Brett Browning, vice president of robotics at Argo AI, the tech company building Ford's self-driving system, compared it to choosing where to ski.

"If you stay in easy environments, on the green slopes, you solve problems, but it turns out not the right set of problems," says Browning. "You never even see the right set of problems."

For the past year, Ford and Argo AI have conducted testing on public roads in Miami and surrounding Dade County in anticipation of launching a commercial business in 2021 that's underpinned by autonomous-driving technology. Should that plan go as expected, Miami will be the first place where Ford's autonomous ambitions take root, a flagpole in a highly competitive environment.

With much riding on Miami, Ford and Argo AI executives lifted the curtain on this yearlong operation and provided a firsthand glimpse at the readiness of their autonomous-driving program last week for investors and others. Before a fleet of self-driving Ford Fusions whisked visitors on rides between a half-dozen locations throughout the city, the executives underscored this was not a choreographed demonstration with thorny aspects of city driving avoided or hidden away.

"You are not seeing a sterile test today," Browning said. "You are seeing the real thing."

Riding along Biscayne Boulevard, the enormity of the challenge ahead and the complexity involved in building a roadworthy system are apparent in minutes. A bicyclist in a bike lane pedals in the wrong direction, against traffic two feet away. A woman twirls around a street pole like Gene Kelly in Singin' In The Rain, dangling precariously over the curb, oblivious to traffic. A pickup rolls to a stop — 20 feet beyond a stop sign.

These were among the first in a dozen or so scenarios encountered over the course of the day that would cause any driver — autonomous or human — to approach with caution and perhaps hit the brakes, and that's just what our vehicle did. It turns out these were the simple scenarios.

Later, the Fusion was faced with a more complicated challenge. It made a left turn into the left lane of a two-lane road. The car was supposed to continue straight, but the lane quickly morphed into another left-turn lane.

Human drivers with similar intentions, following behind the Fusion, made the left turn and transitioned immediately into the right-hand lane. Though they had foregone legality, they had the foresight to understand they quickly needed to switch lanes after the turn to continue straight. For the Fusion's good deeds, the car ended up marooned until a human safety driver intervened, and drove with the aggressiveness required to rejoin traffic.

That is a situation that Argo sees as the most arduous challenge and fertile opportunity for improvement. Argo's vehicles, which currently number about a dozen in Miami overall, will always follow the law and keep riders safe, says Argo AI's president, Pete Rander. But there's a third factor necessary for viable operations: Assertiveness.

"You must act confidently, you must move decisively, and you must signal not only with turn signals but by motion," said Rander. "Timid and halting behaviors are not really going to work well, and other drivers will quickly get frustrated. There's a pace in Miami and you need to fit in."

Like others, Argo is attempting to develop that assertiveness by better predicting what other road users will do in a given situation. If its systems cannot make advanced plans for what a pedestrian or other vehicle will do, developers are left playing it safe by placing too great a protective distance around vehicles, which subsequently leads to timid behavior.

In concert with a fortified prediction engine, Argo is ensuring that its cars have a better grasp of their situational awareness. If a traffic light turns yellow, for example, a self-driving system must instantly understand whether it can cross and clear an intersection before the light turns red. But that's not all.

"If we see a yellow light and slam on the brakes, we might get rear-ended," Rander said. "But if I blow through the intersection and the light turns red, I may not get rear-ended, but I might violate the law, and that's not acceptable either."

That's a conundrum Rander and Argo will encounter anywhere. But in Miami, it's just one factor in a city with dead-ends on roads that maps show as joining others, where road construction started in nine separate places along one Argo route, and where cars and bicyclists routinely go the wrong way down one-way streets. If Ford and Argo wanted a challenge, they found one.

Jeff Brandes, a Florida state senator who has encouraged autonomous-vehicle testing on state roads, carried on the ski slope comparison.

"This is a double black-diamond city," says Brandes. "It is a hard city to operate in. There's no one day in Miami. Every day is different."