Autonomous driving has advanced in significant ways over the past decade, though the technology still faces some stubborn challenges.
While driverless systems are often capable of reacting to scenarios more safely than a human driver would, sometimes the opposite is true – as evidenced by crashes over the years where a vehicle in autonomous mode has missed a seemingly obvious hazard.
A new study may have pinpointed one of the reasons behind the gap in these results.
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Researchers from Ben-Gurion University and Japanese tech company Fujitsu Limited have published a paper that suggests the problem might be how autonomous vehicle systems react to emergency vehicles… or, more specifically: emergency vehicle lights.
The study says that some camera-based automated systems can go a bit berserk when they observe the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle. The researchers liken the reaction to a kind of “digital epileptic seizure,” the results of which are an inability for the system to confidently identify what’s ahead on the road.
They say the problem is worse at night, and that the flaw creates “significant risk” that these vehicles could crash.
Perhaps even more alarming, they suggest that autonomous vehicles could “be exploited by adversaries to cause such accidents.”
According to Wired, the research was inspired by reports that Teslas on Autopilot had collided with 16 stationary emergency vehicles over the course of a four year period.
And while the researchers say it was “pretty obvious” the crashes “might be related” to the emergency flashers, there’s a caveat: they didn’t actually test their theory on Teslas, instead using aftermarket collision detection cameras.
That said, they may be on to something nonetheless. Wired published a statement from the NHTSA, where spokesperson Lucia Sanchez responded to the study by saying, in part, the agency was “aware” of some advanced driver assistance systems “that have not responded appropriately when emergency flashing lights were present … under certain circumstances.”
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