COMPUTER CHAUFFEUR GETTING CLOSER
AI is quietly making driving safer, and features like speechrecognition and other safety applications are now found in new cars, writes
COMPUTERS may one day be trustworthy replacements for drivers. The secret sauce of those computers’ becoming our chauffeurs is the ubiquitous force of artificial intelligence, which is already active in virtual personal assistants and a bank’s customerservice chat bot.
But it’s the automobile where AI could have a critical role for the greatest number of people.
Few AI applications carry the responsibility of automotive safety systems, where actions must be carried out in nanoseconds and an ill-considered response may have costly consequences.
Systems that marry microprocessors, sensors and software to make fully driverless cars possible are in the advanced stages of development, but experts say the leap from today’s computer-assisted driving to fully automated motoring that may render humans optional remains considerable.
Still, AI is already quietly making driving safer. Beyond the applications now found in new cars, typically in conveniences like the speech-recognition feature of infotainment systems, are the subsystems that make up the packages of safety features common largely in luxury vehicles.
Enhancements like night vision, automatic emergency braking and lane keeping all depend on processors that use sensors and computer instructions to warn drivers of danger or act to avoid collisions.
The term AI, coined in the 1950s, is something of an unfortunate choice, at least in terms of the automobile. The intelligence within cars — their ability to learn and to apply that knowledge — is far from artificial; it is hard-earned. It comes down to capable electronics, sensors and, especially, extensive training.
“Training is like teaching our kids to drive, with rules, absolutes and best practices,” Glen De Vos, chief technology officer at Aptiv. “Some rules are embedded in the system — never out-drive the free space around the vehicle, obey road signs — but as you move up the spectrum toward accident avoidance, a predictive capacity is necessary.”
Aptiv, a spinoff from Delphi Automotive, an auto industry supplier, builds the data sets that a trained AI system depends on. Most of that data is accumulated on the road, acquired in videos to create the basic knowledge bank that computers draw on.
Data is also collected by radar, or lidar, its light-beam equivalent. A high degree of refinement of the data, covering every possible situation, is vital to assuring that the safety systems don’t issue excessive warnings, an annoyance that may lead a driver to ignore such signals.
The collecting of data to inform automotive AI systems will be greatly improved by a coming generation of connected cars — 50 million communicating wirelessly with each other by 2020 — according to Sachin Lulla, IBM’s automotive leader.
Some of the tasks where AI takes an important role happen inside the car. Driver monitoring is a major component of advanced safety systems, with cameras mounted in the dashboard watching eye and head positions and even pulse rate through a steering-wheel sensor. The concept, IBM says, is to add context — the driver’s condition and degree of engagement — to complete the picture of the situation in the car and on the road.
One of AI’s strengths is simple object recognition. But when a problem becomes more complex, like when an obstacle is detected in the road during a snowstorm, the advantage of using AI is its ability to solve problems that are otherwise too complex for existing systems. AI gets answers a lot faster.
The computing power it takes to operate a car with self-driving capability is staggering. A graphics processing unit to perform object recognition works at a computer speed of a trillion floating-point operations per second. The main processor’s performance is measured in millions of instructions per second.
While automakers have embraced the goal of eliminating all fatalities, deploying AI and autonomous vehicles can go only so far towards achieving that. A drunken driver of an older car could blow through a stop sign, and road conditions will be responsible for some collisions.
NYT