Self-driving vehicle is baffled by kangaroos

Volvo’s self-driving car is unable to detect kangaroos because hopping confounds its systems, the Swedish carmaker says.

The company’s ‘‘Large Animal Detection System’’ can identify and avoid deer, elk and caribou, but early testing in Australia has found that it cannot adjust to the kangaroo’s unique method of movement.

The managing director of Volvo Australia, Kevin McCann, said the discovery was part of the development and testing of driverless technology, and would not pose problems by the time Volvo’s driverless cars would be available in 2020.

‘‘Any company that would be working on the autonomous car concept would be having to do the same developmental work,’’ he said. ‘‘We brought our engineers into Australia to begin the exercise of gathering the data of how the animals can move and behave so the computers can understand it more.’’

Volvo’s Australian technical manager, David Pickett, said the troubles had arisen because the car’s object detection systems used the ground as a reference point. This meant a kangaroo’s hopping was making it difficult to judge how close the animal was to the vehicle.

‘‘When it’s in the air, it actually looks like it’s further away, then it lands and it looks closer,’’ he said.

Volvo’s detection system was designed in Sweden, where it was tested in areas populated with moose, before trials at a nature reserve in Canberra revealed the problem with kangaroos.

Kangaroos cause more road accidents than any other animal in Australia. The marsupials are responsible for about 90 per cent of collisions between vehicles and animals, although most are not serious .

A spokeswoman for Robert Bosch Australia, which develops component technology for driverless cars, said its system could theoretically recognise kangaroos.

‘‘Although it hasn’t been tested in a kangaroo-specific environment, there was an instance where black swans were interfering, and so they had to build into the car the ability to recognise animals,’’ Amy Kaa said.

Volvo plans to release its first autonomous cars by 2020, and has pledged zero fatalities or serious injuries from all its cars by that time.

‘‘The whole development process has to take in as many variations of conditions as possible,’’ McCann said. ‘‘It’s a fairly drawn-out process.

‘‘We don’t even refer to it specifically as kangaroo detection. It’s what we call small animal detection.’’