Cars are
becoming increasingly automated. Drivers already benefit from a wide range of
advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), such as lane keeping, adaptive
cruise control, collision warning, and blind spot warning, which are gradually
becoming standard features on most vehicles.
Today’s
automated systems are taking over an increasing amount of responsibility for the
driving task.
It is
expected that soon, sensors will take the place of human impulse, and
artificial intelligence will substitute for human intelligence.
This process
is defined through various level steps, from low levels of automation where the
driver retains overall control of the vehicle in level 1, to a fully-autonomous
system in level 5.
10 years
ago, manufacturers predicted many cars on today’s roads would be fully automated,
but it still remains a distant future for the automotive industry. At the
recent Future Networked Car Symposium 2020 at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland,
top experts joined a panel entitled “AI for autonomous and assisted driving —
how to ensure safety and public trust” to discuss the progress and the prospects
for vehicles that drive themselves — and how we might achieve this future.
Updated
predictions for autonomous vehicles
Some
panellists agreed that achieving fully autonomous systems, which expect and
react to a vehicle’s performance to the same level as a human driver in every
scenario — also known as ADAS level 5 — is unlikely, certainly in the near
future.
“There is no
AI. AI is a buzzword! None of these systems are even close to passing a Turing
Test. They are code, many of them are black boxes that have done some sort of
regression to get coefficient to run things,” said Alain Kornhauser, Professor,
Princeton University, USA.
Meanwhile,
Bryn Balcombe, Chief Strategy Officer of Roborace, distinguished between the
algorithms for driving decisions and the underlying hardware architecture. No
vehicle is driving itself, rather it is the algorithm driving the vehicle, he
pointed out.
“People
thought there would be a level 5. Now, there’s a lot of discussion about ’There
will never be level 5’! It is just too hard to do,” said William Gouse,
Director, Federal Program Development, SAE International, Washington, DC. “It
is not a linear step from level 4 to 5.”
He stressed
the functional difference between an artificial intelligence (AI) performance
in a simulated environment versus a real-world application as a defining barrier
to safety and trust.
Critical
concerns over security need to be answered first. “Did AI learn bad traffic
habits? Did it break some rules because it was hacked?” asked Gouse.
Validating
autonomous driving
Ongoing
validation of autonomous vehicles is a necessary step to addressing these
concerns and ensuring the safety of all road users, said Balcombe.
“When we
look at whether these systems are safe, how can we ensure that they perform the
driving task as well — if not better — than a human? Because that is the public
expectation,” said Balcombe.
“It is not
going to be acceptable to say [that the automotive driving software] passed in
simulator; “I’m sorry that your child ran out in the road, I wasn’t expecting
that to happen — it wasn’t part of my scenario testing.” That is something that
cannot happen,” he said.
“We have to
have some mechanism to monitor the behaviour of these vehicles when they are on
the road to keep that public trust.”
But it is not
just the technology that needs to be monitored in an autonomous future. The panelists
agreed that human misbehaviour, rather than human error, is one of the primary
causes of road accidents.
“There are
some risks regarding artificial intelligence, not because of the technology but
because of the use. We are trying to evaluate and assess where the risk could
be,” said Juan Jose Arriola Ballesteros of the European Commission.
Ballesteros
highlighted the importance of the new Focus Group on AI for autonomous and
assisted driving, set up by the ITU.
He said that
the European Union is working on a strategy based on the principles of trust
and excellence, and is currently developing a strategy introducing these new technologies
on the roads.
Work is underway
on a potential vehicle gateway requirement for Europe. But given the hurdles faced
by autonomous driving, panellists agreed that there may be a market for
mobility as a service instead of for private use.
“I don’t
think anybody is going to sell us or let us own a vehicle that we can just send
out on public roads with nobody in it to go pick up our lunch. I don’t think we
are responsible enough as individuals,” said Kornhauser. “There is a market for
mobility as a service.”
This vision
of mass transit mobility as a service would need to be done by a respected body
that can distribute risk over an enormous number of entities, said Kornhauser.
But how do you build public trust?
“If they are
not safe, the mobility as a service piece will never happen,” he said.
Ref: No.1 2020 ITU News Magazine