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.

Comments

Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[damn_registrars]

The White-Tailed Deer (and likely other related species - I'm only personally familiar with this one) moves in a bounding manner, often with all four legs off the ground. What makes it that much different from the kangaroo in the eyes of the driverless car? Is it at in the height difference in terms of on the ground versus not on the ground?

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[DontBeAMoran]

Volvo isn't in the habit of testing their cars upside-down.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[DontBeAMoran]

Does a deer look anything like a kangaroo to you?

Only when I'm drunk.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[Dutch Gun]

I know it's passé to read TFA, but:

Volvo's safety engineers began filming kangaroos' roadside behaviour in a nationally recognised hotspot for collisions in 2015.

There's a picture of a Volvo vehicle with "Kangaroo detection data collection vehicle" printed on its side.

So... they're working on it, with good training data.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[dj245]

I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.

But Moose live in Sweden. Moose are much larger than deer, but share the same basic body type (large body on relatively long and thin legs). Special caution needs to be taken with moose, since their eyes don't glow in the dark, and they have tendencies to bite. In fact, a moose once bit my sister.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[DontBeAMoran]

When the deer are drunk, cars look like metal bears.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[nnet]

newfoundland speedbump...

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[viperidaenz]

Unless you see kangaroos in a zoo setting. Then they mope around walking like a tripod on their feet and tails without enough room to jump.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[OrangeTide]

Didn't you know? If driverless cars can't work 100% perfectly now, how will they ever do so in the future?

I mean, that is proper actual logic, that.

It's the same people that demand zero insect parts in their wheat and corn. It's just not going to happen. We can keep the amount of crushed up insects you accidentally ingest very low, but it's unreasonable to expect it to be zero. The amount of dead mice (by mass) ground up with your flour is even lower than the insect parts.

PS - The amount of urine in a public swimming pool is much higher than it is reasonable, and everyone has a right to complain about that and demand that it be lower.

Re:Kangaroo vs White-Tailed Deer

[serviscope_minor]

a moose once bit my sister.

Realli?

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[religionofpeas]

No animal on the planet would run into a kangaroo.

Except for humans. According to TFA there are 16,000 kangaroo strikes per year.

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[OrangeTide]

Not very many 1200 kg animals roll along the ground at 120 km/h. Newton's first law of motion combined with the square-cube law makes this a non-trivial problem. I think the key to self-driving cars is for them to not kill any more people than human driven cars already do, luckily for self-driving cars we human drivers established a fairly easy baseline to pass.

With your analogy, we didn't simply give up, we still used machine guns even if they were not perfected.

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[drinkypoo]

No animal on the planet would run into a kangaroo. Perhaps the entire concept of the sensor is just way off.

Except for humans. According to TFA there are 16,000 kangaroo strikes per year.

Seems like you're both right (although you're much more right.) Humans' sensors aren't great for depth perception at night, which is when most animal strikes occur — and according to WP, most roos are nocturnal. If the excuse is that the roo "looks" like it's closer or further away depending on whether it's in the air, then I suspect the flaw is inadequate depth sensing. The car should be dramatically better at this than a human before it's allowed to run around at speeds over a walking pace.

The obvious solution is...

[Nutria]

to kill all kangaroos.

(If I were Bender Bending RodrÃguez, the obvious solution would be to kill all humans, but since I'm not Bender Bending RodrÃguez, that's not the solution.)

They confuse me too.

[gurps_npc]

What's with the boxing? Who the hell taught them to fight like men? WHY?

And marsupials are just flip-floppers. Birth but still inside the mother's pouch? Come on out already. Are they going for a second birthday?

Re:Me too.

[TechyImmigrant]

I'm confused by Kangaroos too.

Let's not jump to conclusions.

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[religionofpeas]

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.

The car should be dramatically better at this than a human

Better than a human is good enough for now.

The real problem of the 'self driving car':

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is the 'so-called' 'AI' is not a real 'AI' (and I and many others wish they'd stop referring to it as such). It only half-assed recognizes things based on what it's 'trained' to recognize. A human being, seeing some animal they've never seen before in their life but that is crossing the road, is going to swerve or stop anyway because the human brain is actually intelligent. These 'deep learning algorithms' are not even as smart as a dog brain. I think the entire approach is doomed; it shows enough promise to get investors to give them money, but it'll never be as good as a human driver because it's not really 'intelligent'.

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[Wycliffe]

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.

Re:Binocular Vision

[angel'o'sphere]

All self driving/autonomous/driver assisted cars have minimum 2 cameras.
Facepalm.

Re:uhuh, long way to go

[ColaMan]

It's not about depth perception.

Roos are erratic creatures and can move very quickly. So one will be grazing 20 metres off the side of the road, become spooked by your headlights, bound onto the road in two or three hops, and hit your car.

It's about a second per hop for roos, so this takes place very quickly, well inside the illuminated area that your headlights project. Often they will appear from the vegetation on the side of the road and then be on the road in one hop, only 10 or so metres in front of you. It's why most cars in rural Australia are festooned with LED light bars and spotlights because the further and - most importantly - the wider you can see at night, the better.

Here are a few typical roo strikes to give you some idea of the problem -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - This one in particular.