The researchers supposedly used similar but not quite the same approach as Tesla, and claimed it worked worse for people of color. That makes sense since optical recognition is harder for dark skinned people.
However, the article leads with a picture of a Cruise car, which use lidar technology. Those should afaik recognize people with the same accuracy regardless of skin color.
I thought Waymo and Cruise are both using optical and LiDAR (using fancy sensor fusion algorithms to make those work safely together), so this would impact them as well? LiDAR alone isn’t going to be able to tell if something is a pedestrian, just that something is there, optical is still needed to determine that the thing is a person.
However, the article leads with a picture of a Cruise car, which use lidar technology. Those should afaik recognize people with the same accuracy regardless of skin color.