Regaining Sight of Humanity on The Roadway towards Automation

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (16) ◽  
pp. 88-1-88-5
Author(s):  
Mónica López-González

A primary goal of the auto industry is to revolutionize transportation with autonomous vehicles. Given the mammoth nature of such a target, success depends on a clearly defined balance between technological advances, machine learning algorithms, physical and network infrastructure, safety, standards and regulations, and end-user education. Unfortunately, technological advancement is outpacing the regulatory space and competition is driving deployment. Moreover, hope is being built around algorithms that are far from reaching human-like capacities on the road. Since human behaviors and idiosyncrasies and natural phenomena are not going anywhere anytime soon and so-called edge cases are the roadway norm, the industry stands at a historic crossroads. Why? Because human factors such as cognitive and behavioral insights into how we think, feel, act, plan, make decisions, and problem-solve have been ignored. Human cognitive intelligence is foundational to driving the industry’s ambition forward. In this paper I discuss the role of the human in bridging the gaps between autonomous vehicle technology, design, implementation, and beyond.

Author(s):  
Pooja Jha ◽  
K. Sridhar Patnaik

Human errors are the main cause of vehicle crashes. Self-driving cars bear the promise to significantly reduce accidents by taking the human factor out of the equation, while in parallel monitor the surroundings, detect and react immediately to potentially dangerous situations and driving behaviors. Artificial intelligence tool trains the computers to do things like detect lane lines and identify cyclists by showing them millions of examples of the subject at hand. The chapter in this book discusses the technological advancement in transportation. It also covers the autonomy used according to The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The functional architecture of self-driving cars is further discussed. The chapter also talks about two algorithms for detection of lanes as well as detection of vehicles on the road for self-driving cars. Next, the ethical discussions surrounding the autonomous vehicle involving stakeholders, technologies, social environments, and costs vs. quality have been discussed.


Author(s):  
Michal Hochman ◽  
Tal Oron-Gilad

This study explored pedestrians’ understanding of Fully Autonomous Vehicle (FAV) intention and what influences their decision to cross. Twenty participants saw fixed simulated urban road crossing scenes with a FAV present on the road. The scenes differed from one another in the FAV’s messages: the external Human-Machine Interfaces (e-HMI) background color, message type and modality, the FAV’s distance from the crossing place, and its size. Eye-tracking data and objective measurements were collected. Results revealed that pedestrians looked at the e-HMI before making their decision; however, they did not always make the decision according to the e-HMIs’ color, instructions (in advice messages), or intention (in status messages). Moreover, when they acted according to the e-HMI proposition, for certain distance conditions, they tended to hesitate before making the decision. Findings suggest that pedestrians’ decision making to cross depends on a combination of the e-HMI implementation and the car distance. Future work should explore the robustness of the findings in dynamic and more complex crossing environments.


Vehicles ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 764-777
Author(s):  
Dario Niermann ◽  
Alexander Trende ◽  
Klas Ihme ◽  
Uwe Drewitz ◽  
Cornelia Hollander ◽  
...  

The quickly rising development of autonomous vehicle technology and increase of (semi-) autonomous vehicles on the road leads to an increased demand for more sophisticated human–machine-cooperation approaches to improve trust and acceptance of these new systems. In this work, we investigate the feeling of discomfort of human passengers while driving autonomously and the automatic detection of this discomfort with several model approaches, using the combination of different data sources. Based on a driving simulator study, we analyzed the discomfort reports of 50 participants for autonomous inner city driving. We found that perceived discomfort depends on the driving scenario (with discomfort generally peaking in complex situations) and on the passenger (resulting in interindividual differences in reported discomfort extend and duration). Further, we describe three different model approaches on how to predict the passenger discomfort using data from the vehicle’s sensors as well as physiological and behavioral data from the passenger. The model’s precision varies greatly across the approaches, the best approach having a precision of up to 80%. All of our presented model approaches use combinations of linear models and are thus fast, transparent, and safe. Lastly, we analyzed these models using the SHAP method, which enables explaining the models’ discomfort predictions. These explanations are used to infer the importance of our collected features and to create a scenario-based discomfort analysis. Our work demonstrates a novel approach on passenger state modelling with simple, safe, and transparent models and with explainable model predictions, which can be used to adapt the vehicles’ actions to the needs of the passenger.


Author(s):  
Yazan Alqudah ◽  
Belal Sababha ◽  
Esam Qaralleh ◽  
Tarek Yousseff

With the ever-increasing vehicle population and introduction of autonomous and self-driving cars, innovative research is needed to ensure safety and reliability on the road. This work introduces an innovative solution that aims at understanding vehicle behavior based on sensors data. The behavior is classified according to driving events. Understanding driving events can play a significant role in road safety and estimating the expense and risks of driving and consuming a vehicle. Rather than relying on the distance and time driven, driving events can provide a more accurate measure of vehicle driving consumption.  This measure will become more valuable as more autonomous vehicles and more ride sharing applications are introduced to roads around the world. Estimating driving events can also help better design the road infrastructure to reduce energy consumption.  By sharing data from official vehicles and volunteers, crowd sensing can be used to better understand congestion and road safety. This work studies driving events and proposes using machine learning to classify these events into different categories. The acquired data is collected using embedded mobile device motion sensors and are used to train machine learning algorithms to classify the events.


Author(s):  
László Orgován ◽  
Tamás Bécsi ◽  
Szilárd Aradi

Autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars are prevalent nowadays, many vehicle manufacturers, and other tech companies are trying to develop autonomous vehicles. One major goal of the self-driving algorithms is to perform manoeuvres safely, even when some anomaly arises. To solve these kinds of complex issues, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods are used. One of these motion planning problems is when the tires lose their grip on the road, an autonomous vehicle should handle this situation. Thus the paper provides an Autonomous Drifting algorithm using Reinforcement Learning. The algorithm is based on a model-free learning algorithm, Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3). The model is trained on six different tracks in a simulator, which is developed specifically for autonomous driving systems; namely CARLA.


2018 ◽  
Vol 220 ◽  
pp. 02004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Agafonov ◽  
Aleksandr Borodinov

Autonomous vehicle development is one of many trends that will affect future transport demands and planning needs. Autonomous vehicles management in the context of an intelligent transportation system could significantly reduce the traffic congestion level and decrease the overall travel time in a network. In this work, we investigate a route reservation architecture to manage road traffic within an urban area. The routing architecture decomposes road segments into time and spatial slots and for every vehicle, it makes the reservation of the appropriate slots on the road segments in the selected route. This approach allows to predict the traffic in the network and to find the shortest path more precisely. We propose to use a rerouting procedure to improve the quality of the routing approach. Experimental study of the routing architecture is conducted using microscopic traffic simulation in SUMO package.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Kołodziejska ◽  
Karolina Krzykowska ◽  
Mirosław Siergiejczyk

Abstract In recent years, around the world, there has been work underway on systems, which will increase not only the comfort of traveling but, above all, the safety and reliability of the road traffic. The systems in this field, designed to replace human beings in the future, thus eliminating their mistakes on the road, already have their prototypes. However, these prototypes are still being improved and require a lot of work so they could operate fully and reliably. The subject of the publication is a compilation of two new concepts in the field of Intelligent Transport Systems. These concepts are V2V (Vehicle - to - Vehicle) and A2A (Autonomous vehicle - to - Autonomous vehicle). Their comparison was carried out in terms of functionality, communication, vehicle equipment, legal aspects and the anticipated date of their entry into the market. Also examples of first tests and implementations of vehicles with driver assistance systems, and semi-autonomous vehicles were presented.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 1021
Author(s):  
Teck Kai Chan ◽  
Cheng Siong Chin

With the concept of Internet-of-Things, autonomous vehicles can provide higher driving efficiency, traffic safety, and freedom for the driver to perform other tasks. This paper first covers enabling technology involving a vehicle moving out of parking, traveling on the road, and parking at the destination. The development of autonomous vehicles relies on the data collected for deployment in actual road conditions. Research gaps and recommendations for autonomous intelligent vehicles are included. For example, a sudden obstacle while the autonomous vehicle executes the parking trajectory on the road is discussed. Several aspects of social problems, such as the liability of an accident affecting the autonomous vehicle, are described. A smart device to detect abnormal driving behaviors to prevent possible accidents is briefly discussed.


Author(s):  
Xing Xu ◽  
Minglei Li ◽  
Feng Wang ◽  
Ju Xie ◽  
Xiaohan Wu ◽  
...  

A human-like trajectory could give a safe and comfortable feeling for the occupants in an autonomous vehicle especially in corners. The research of this paper focuses on planning a human-like trajectory along a section road on a test track using optimal control method that could reflect natural driving behaviour considering the sense of natural and comfortable for the passengers, which could improve the acceptability of driverless vehicles in the future. A mass point vehicle dynamic model is modelled in the curvilinear coordinate system, then an optimal trajectory is generated by using an optimal control method. The optimal control problem is formulated and then solved by using the Matlab tool GPOPS-II. Trials are carried out on a test track, and the tested data are collected and processed, then the trajectory data in different corners are obtained. Different TLCs calculations are derived and applied to different track sections. After that, the human driver’s trajectories and the optimal line are compared to see the correlation using TLC methods. The results show that the optimal trajectory shows a similar trend with human’s trajectories to some extent when driving through a corner although it is not so perfectly aligned with the tested trajectories, which could conform with people’s driving intuition and improve the occupants’ comfort when driving in a corner. This could improve the acceptability of AVs in the automotive market in the future. The driver tends to move to the outside of the lane gradually after passing the apex when driving in corners on the road with hard-lines on both sides.


Author(s):  
Varsha R ◽  
Meghna Manoj Nair ◽  
Siddharth M. Nair ◽  
Amit Kumar Tyagi

The Internet of Things (smart things) is used in many sectors and applications due to recent technological advances. One of such application is in the transportation system, which is of primary use for the users to move from one place to another place. The smart devices which were embedded in vehicles are useful for the passengers to solve his/her query, wherein future vehicles will be fully automated to the advanced stage, i.e. future cars with driverless feature. These autonomous cars will help people a lot to reduce their time and increases their productivity in their respective (associated) business. In today’s generation and in the near future, privacy preserving and trust will be a major concern among users and autonomous vehicles and hence, this paper will be able to provide clarity for the same. Many attempts in previous decade have provided many efficient mechanisms, but they all work only with vehicles along with a driver. However, these mechanisms are not valid and useful for future vehicles. In this paper, we will use deep learning techniques for building trust using recommender systems and Blockchain technology for privacy preserving. We also maintain a certain level of trust via maintaining the highest level of privacy among users living in a particular environment. In this research, we developed a framework that could offer maximum trust or reliable communication to users over the road network. With this, we also preserve privacy of users during traveling, i.e., without revealing identity of respective users from Trusted Third Parties or even Location Based Service in reaching a destination. Thus, Deep Learning based Blockchain Solution (DLBS) is illustrated for providing an efficient recommendation system.


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