VOICE OVER: How do you give a driverless car a driving test?
Researchers have a new way to test out an AI’s driving skills.
It works by surrounding the car with other AIs. But these ones
are virtual simulations - and they’ve been trained to be terrible drivers.
TITLE: The driving test for driverless cars
VOICE OVER: The world is waiting for the first fully autonomous car.
HENRY LIU: Around 2015 or so, a number of companies announced that they
will be able to produce autonomous vehicles in mass amount by 2020,
and now we are 2023, we do not have any commercial available autonomous vehicle yet.
VOICE OVER: Henry Liu has been looking forward to his own driverless car for some time.
In a true autonomous vehicle you could play games on your commute,
save on fuel costs and send your kids off without worrying…
HENRY: It’s dear to my heart because I have two young children, one is 17, one’s 15, and if we
do have autonomous vehicle at this time then they don’t have to drive, I will feel safer for them
VOICE OVER: But to make sure these cars are safe, we need to be confident that
they can handle any situation they come across - and that takes a lot of testing.
HENRY: A major bottleneck for autonomous vehicle development is the high cost and time required to
test the safety performance. Just think about this: for human drivers we might have accident
for every half million to a million miles, and one fatality per 100 million miles.
So if you want to validate the autonomous vehicle, the safety performance is better than
human drivers, then statistically you really need billions of miles.
VOICE OVER: But you can’t just let prototype cars loose on real roads,
potentially endangering other road users, so Henry and his team in Michigan in the USA are developing
a new kind of test to make sure autonomous vehicles are safe. They’ve combined a real
test track with augmented reality obstacles. These obstacles are invisible to us but feed
into the car’s sensors - so the AI reacts as if they were completely real.
HENRY: I was one of the test drivers and sometimes it could be a little
nervous because the vehicle could perform a hot brake just to avoid some of the front objects.
VOICE OVER: To really put the driverless car to the test,
the virtual environment has to be full of challenges.
HENRY: You can generate all sorts of things, right! So you can generate animals,
you know a deer, a pedestrian, a bicyclist and see how the autonomous vehicle reacts.
VOICE OVER: These obstacles are generated by the team's AI based on real life data. But in
a realistic simulation, dangerous events don’t happen that often. So
to really put the car through its paces, they skewed that training data to focus
on the kind of dangerous driving which is not frequently seen, but could be deadly.
HENRY: We combine these safety critical cases together. And that’s why we call it
dense learning because we densify the information we have. Then we use this dense learning approach to
train the surrounding vehicles, not the pre-trained autonomous vehicle,
to learn that at what moment perform what maneuvre to challenge the autonomous vehicle.
VOICE OVER: The result is a simulation filled with terrible drivers and surprising obstacles.
And what’s more, because these situations are generated by an AI and not programmed,
they don’t just perform a fixed set of challenging maneuvres - they can generate dangerous events
with variety and complexity, and learn how to best put the autonomous vehicle to the test.
HENRY: That’s why we call it AI against AI approach. And our argument for this
is that to test autonomous system, you need a very intelligent test environment.
VOICE OVER: This intelligent environment is already being
used to test and even train some of the autonomous cars currently in development.
HENRY: We’re hoping this technique can be broadly used for not only AV
developers but also for government agencies because they want to make
sure these autonomous vehicles are safe to be driven on public roads as well.
VOICE OVER: And these cars won’t just be able to drive as well as humans but hopefully even better.
HENRY: Accident occurs mostly associated with human errors.
You know, human under the influence or human being distracted by reading cell phones while driving.
VOICE OVER: Henry hopes that his research could help developers fill the roads with
self-driving cars far safer than human drivers. But for now there’s
a little way to go before autonomous vehicles can pass their driving tests…