I was thinking about this the other day - driving in construction. The town I live in is currently doing water main replacement. So, lots of torn up roads, closed lanes and even single-lane only with a flagger alternating directions. No amount of safety cones will make it obvious what's going on.
How do automated systems deal with flaggers? Visibility of the stop/slow sign isn't sufficient to make a determination on whether it's safe to proceed (not to mention "stop" changes meaning here, entirely, from a typical stop sign). Often, whether or not you can proceed comes down to hand gestures from the flagger proper.
Not that I expect any reasonable driver to be using something like autopilot through such a situation, but we've also seen plenty of evidence that there are unreasonable drivers currently using these systems, as well.
Conceivably in the somewhat-near future (10 years+), most cars on the road will have some sort of ADAS system, in which I'd presume it'd start to make sense for construction to use some sort of digital signalling. Something like a radio signal broadcast that can send basic slow/stop flagging signals to a lane of traffic.
Of course, the problem is, if we haven't developed it today, the ADAS systems of today won't understand it in ten years when there's enough saturation to be practical to use it. Apart from Tesla, very few car manufacturers are reckless enough to send OTA updates that can impact driving behavior.
Lane-following ADAS systems of today, mind you, can work relatively fine in construction areas... provided lane lines are moved, as opposed to relying solely on traffic cones.
How do automated systems deal with flaggers? Visibility of the stop/slow sign isn't sufficient to make a determination on whether it's safe to proceed (not to mention "stop" changes meaning here, entirely, from a typical stop sign). Often, whether or not you can proceed comes down to hand gestures from the flagger proper.
Not that I expect any reasonable driver to be using something like autopilot through such a situation, but we've also seen plenty of evidence that there are unreasonable drivers currently using these systems, as well.