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Driverless Cars Are Roundabout Rookies, Circling Confusion
Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider
Help, I am stuck in a roundabout and I can’t get out!
For those of you that have ever driven into a roundabout, often also known as a traffic circle, a road circle, and sometimes a rotary, they can be devilish to navigate.
Typically, a novice driver finds them to be frightening and a real-world version of a crazy bumper-car mad dash. Seasoned drivers like to think that they have mastered the roundabout and so act like it is a breeze to traverse one. Even seasoned drivers are at times though thrown for a loop, as it were, and find themselves baffled and frustrated by a roundabout. If you get enough drivers going through a roundabout and if they are all behaving badly, you find yourself wishing you had gone some other path and had avoided the dreaded roundabout.
At the Cybernetics AI Self-Driving Car Institute, we’ve been developing techniques and software to enable AI self-driving driverless cars to properly traverse a roundabout.
Most of today’s self-driving cars hand the driving back to the human driver when encountering a roundabout. That’s if the self-driving car even realizes that a roundabout is about to occur or occurring.
Some self-driving cars head into a roundabout without the realization that it is a roundabout. The AI of the self-driving car is often ill-prepared for the specific dynamics of a roundabout. As such, the AI either struggles to make it through the traffic circle safely, or at the last moment is gives up and tosses control of the vehicle to the human driver. This is not only dangerous for the human driver and passengers, since the act of taking over control suddenly can be disruptive and create confusion for the human driver, it also violates the principle of the Level 5 true self-driving car which is that the AI must be able to do whatever driving a human driver could do.
In that sense, we need to have a solution for roundabouts if we are going to achieve Level 5 self-driving cars, true driverless cars.
For those of you that have rarely if ever encountered a roundabout, they aren’t especially common in the United States, numbering an estimated 3,000 or so across the entire country. In contrast…
