Background
- NHTSA(National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) states that 94% of serious crashes are due to human error and that automated vehicles have the potential to remove human error from the equation.
What are autonomous cars
An autonomous car is a vehicle capable of sensing its environment and operating without human involvement; a human passenger is not required to take control of the vehicle at any time, nor a human passenger required to be present in the vehicle at all.
How does it work
In general, autonomous cars include 4 stages of activity: perception, localization, planning and control. Deep learning is implemented on all 4 sections.
- perception
- find the environment and obstacles around the car
- localization
- define position in the world/area with a great accuracy
- planning
- define a trajectory from A to B, using perception and localization
- control
- follow the trajectory by controlling the car
Where we currently are
- 52 different companies that have been approved to test autonomous vehicles on the roads of California.
- Tesla
- Baidu / Apollo System
- Argo AI
- NVIDIA / DRIVE Orin
- Waymo (Google)
- We are at Level 3 (Conditional Driving Automation) in terms of driving automation.
- To be honest, the autonomous car is still far from being fully autonomous.
- Watch a person doing Tesla test on “Full Self Driving” mode.
- IIHS(Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) Pedestrian Autobrake Tests
- IIHS creates safeguard ratings for partial automation
Potential problems
- Current road systems
- Some roads are unmarked; the lack of uniformity in road signage and stoplights.
- Weather conditions
- Sensors simply do not work perfectly in heavy bad weather.
- Hacking
- Transparency
- Waymo sues the California DMV to keep driverless crash data secret
- Accident liability
- Who is responsible for accident?
- Trolley Problem
- Human drivers may be forgiven for making an instinctive decision in split-second, but programmers of automated cars do not have that luxury as they have time to get it right.