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Volvo's Driverless Cars 'Confused' by Kangaroos (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Volvo's self-driving technology is struggling to identify kangaroos in the road. The Swedish car-maker's 2017 S90 and XC90 models use its Large Animal Detection system to monitor the road for deer, elk and caribou. But the way kangaroos move confuses it. "We've noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight when it's in the air, it actually looks like it's further away, then it lands and it looks closer," its Australia technical manager said. But the problem would not delay the rollout of driverless cars in the country, David Pickett added.
The good thing is that the car's sensors and algorithms can be fixed. It sounds like it's mostly a case of Volvo overlooking the effect of jumping animals. According to the Volvo information about their autonomous cars, they have camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors. With the right algorithms, the car should be much better than a human at detecting animals at night, and respond much quicker too.
There will always be unknown objects at or near ground level. With camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors, how did they screw up the depth perception that badly? Will it be able to detect a small child? What about a medium size child? What about a box? What about a bumper that fell of a car? What about a flock of birds? What about a chair,cage of turkeys,sofa,trashcan,bale of hay, etc.. that fell off a truck. If you're designing it for known obstacles, you're likely doing it wrong. Every human driver out there is able to detect something that isn't suppose to be there and take corrective actions even if they don't know what the unknown object is.