Self-Driving Cars: Understanding the Pedestrian’s Behavior for a Better Road Safety
Redesigning the world of autonomous vehicle’s
Self-driving cars have gone from a dream to now a reality. This revolution is motivated by several factors, including the advancement towards industry 4.0, smart cities, and intelligent tools.
The autonomous vehicles have systems built with GPS sensing knowledge and cloud systems that can guide the driver without human control. Numerous companies, such as Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and Aurora, Amazon’s self-driving startup, hope to have self-driving vehicles by 2020. This has driven enthusiasm, with a vision to improve traffic and road safety for people potentially.
However, there is still a challenge to understand the pedestrian’s behaviour in crosswalks and intersections. The automotive vehicles must address this challenge, as over 1.35 million pedestrians have died globally due to road traffic in 2016 and continue to rise steadily (World Health Organization, 2018). Pedestrians are one of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars because of their unpredictable behaviours. They can move in any direction, at any time with little warning.
Humans have the skills to distinguish and interpret the behaviour of pedestrians from someone who is trying to cross the road, someone waiting for the bus or someone that is on the phone. However, encoding these kinds of behaviours can be very difficult as pedestrians may appear erratic and lawless.
The U.S. Department of Transportation did a study, on Intersection Safety, which shows that intersections and corners can be a scary and challenging place to anticipate the pedestrian’s direction, and as well as the vehicle that is in control by the human tends not to regard the highway safety codes. This has become a trending issue since March 2018, after an Uber self-driving car killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona.
Google has implemented an intelligent program where their cars tend to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection to avoid any collisions with pedestrians. This allows autonomous vehicles to take the safety step to understand the state of human behaviour when crossing.
The advantage of having autonomous vehicles is that they are programmed to obey all the highway safety codes and react rapidly to avoid any collisions. The safety promise of autonomous vehicles is that they can help decline the number of deaths caused due to traffic crashes and be programmed to route efficiently.
Uber, Tesla, Aurora, and Waymo want to create autonomous systems that can handle the world as it is. Although there is still a large amount of information to seek regarding the behaviours of pedestrians, companies have created crash-avoidance technologies that will send warnings to protect people.
!important, a tech start-up company, has embarked by creating software for pedestrian safety, which will allow automotive companies such as, Uber, Tesla, Aurora, and Waymo to examine pedestrian safety and understand their behaviour. Their system is built upon observing the data collected from the pedestrian walking behaviour and understanding the pedestrian’s dynamic. Their technology will aid automotive companies to make our road safer and eliminate the number of deaths globally by developing P2V (pedestrian to vehicles) and P2X ( Pedestrian to everything) solutions.
According to freep.com, automakers and suppliers have developed an array of systems based on the pedestrian behaviour that will allow self-driven cars to revolutionize our highway safety code system. These systems include automatic braking, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, advanced infotainment, and improved headlights.
The technologies systems involved to create these transitions are developing rapidly, and fully autonomous vehicles have been designed to better and solve our problems. They have been designed to understand pedestrian behaviours and improve the conditions of our road safety. However, the critical question we should be asking is not when self-driving cars will cause future problems, but instead, will pedestrians change their hardly predictable behaviour to be ready for self-driving cars.
