Apple's Driverless Cars
Apple has shed new light on its top-secret driverless car project, as chief executive Tim Cook described the challenge of building autonomous vehicles as “the mother of all” artificial intelligence projects.
Cook said Apple was ploughing resources into developing technology to control driverless vehicles, although he refused to rule out the Silicon Valley firm building its own car at some point.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” said Cook in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “Clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. There are others. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects.” He added: “It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.”
When reports of Apple’s interest in cars started to emerge in the media, it was initially thought that the company was going to challenge the automotive giants of Detroit, which are racing to build their own self-driving cars.
The ‘problem’ posed by Cyclists to Google cars et al
However, driverless cars navigate and detect other road users using a combination of cameras, detailed maps, radar and, in the case of Google cars, Lidar (light detection and ranging), a laser-sensing system adapted from oceanographic surveying. Google, in a company now spun off as Waymo, has been testing driverless cars (with pilots inside) on public streets in the US since 2009, clocking 2.5 million miles, and honing the technology following interactions with other road users.
A driverless car will, in theory, stop if it detects an object in its path, but cyclists, being small and agile, represent a unique challenge. AVs struggle with changes in speed and the huge variety of cycle shapes and sizes. They even struggle to detect which way a bicycle is pointing.
Deep3DBox, a programme designed to identify 3D objects from 2D images, such as camera footage, is the most successful at doing this; yet it only spots a cyclist in 74% of cases, and correctly predicts the direction they are facing just 59% of the time. Poor weather makes detection even less accurate.
Former Renault-Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn described cyclists as “one of the biggest problems for driverless cars” last year. They confuse the vehicles, he said, because at times they behave like pedestrians, at other times like cyclists, and “they don’t respect any rules usually”.
Google has acknowledged that “it’s hard for others to anticipate their movements”. This came after one cyclist bamboozled a self-driving Lexus by performing a prolonged track stand at a junction. Google has since taught its cars to recognise cyclists’ hand signals, different sizes and shapes of bike, and allows them more space on the road.
The issue of detecting and reacting to, unpredictable behaviour, is far from solved.
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