Giving a voice to driverless vehicles; Startup aims to solve how autonomous cars
will communicate with humans
Giving a voice to driverless vehicles; Startup aims to solve how autonomous cars
will communicate with humans
John Markoff The New York Times
<http://newspapers.web.ca/news/nr/en/The%20Toronto%20Star> The Toronto Star ,
Sept. 2, 2016
There are plenty of unanswered questions about how self-driving cars would
function in the real world, such as understanding local driving customs and
handing controls back to a human in an emergency.
Now, a startup called Drive.ai, based in Mountain View, Calif., is trying to
address how an autonomous car would communicate with other drivers and
pedestrians.
The company is emphasizing what is known in the artificial intelligence field as
"human-machine interaction" as a key to confusing road situations.
How does a robot, for example, tell everyone what it plans to do in
intersections when human drivers and people in crosswalks go through an informal
ballet to decide who will go first and who will yield?
"Most people's first interaction with self-driving cars will not be as a rider,
but more likely as a pedestrian crossing the street," said Carol Reiley,
co-founder and president of Drive.ai.
"I think it is so important for everyone to trust this type of technology."
The startup gained some attention earlier this year when it received a licence
from the state of California to test driverless cars on the road.
But this week was the first time its executives outlined, at least in broad
terms, what they planned to do. They would not discuss the company's investors.
The Drive.ai cars won't speak with pedestrians and icyclists. But they will try
to communicate with visual displays that go beyond today's turn signals, perhaps
with bannerlike text and easily identifiable sounds, company officials said.
The company, populated by graduate students and researchers from the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is entering a crowded field in the race to
self-driving vehicles. There are about 20 self-driving car projects in Silicon
Valley and more than four dozen around the country.
Unlike many of the efforts, however, Drive.ai will not attempt to build cars.
Instead, it plans to retrofit commercial fleets for tasks such as parcel
delivery and taxi services.
The company is leaning on a technology called deep learning, a machine-learning
technique that has gained wide popularity among Silicon Valley firms.
It is used for a variety of tasks, such as understanding human speech and
improving the ability to recognize objects in computer vision systems.
An Israeli firm, Mobileye, is the dominant supplier of vision technology to the
automotive industry, but Silicon Valley companies such as Nvidia are also
starting to compete for that business.
The self-driving cars of the future will need to be transparent about what their
intentions are, how they make decisions and what they see, said Reiley, who is a
roboticist with a background in designing underwater robotics and medical
systems.
They will need to communicate clearly, both with the world around them as well
as with their passengers.
"There's the left brain in which a lot of discussion has taken place, what
algorithms and what sensors, the logical side," she said.
"A lot of the discussion around self-driving cars has no human component, which
is really weird because this is the first time a robotic system is going out in
the world and interacting with people."
