Cov’s driverless cars get ‘virtual eyes’
COV MADE DRIVERLESS CARS HAVE BEEN GIVEN ‘VIRTUAL EYES’
DRIVERLESS cars being made in Coventry have been given ‘virtual eyes’ in a bid to build trust between the automated vehicles and humans.
The friendly ‘eye-pods’ have a vital job - to work out how much information self-driving cars should share with users or pedestrians to ensure that people trust them.
The intelligent pods run autonomously on a fabricated street scene at Coventry-based Aurrigo’s Urban Driving Laboratory, while the behaviour of pedestrians is analysed as they wait to cross the road.
The pods seek out the pedestrian - appearing to ‘look’ directly at them - signalling to road users that it has spotted them and intends to avoid them.
Engineers record trust levels in the person before and after the pod makes eye contact to find out whether pedestrian trusts the vehicle to stop.
The ‘eyes’ have been devised by a team of advanced engineers in Jaguar Land Rover’s Future Mobility division.
Pete Bennett, Future Mobility research manager at JLR, said: “It’s second-nature to glance at the driver of the approaching vehicle before stepping into the road.
“Understanding how this translates in tomorrow’s more automated world is important.
“We want to know if it is beneficial to provide humans with information about a vehicle’s intentions or whether simply letting a pedestrian know it has been recognised is enough to improve confidence.”
The trials are part of a wider study exploring how future connected and autonomous vehicles can replicate human behaviour and reactions when driving.
As part of the study, more than 500 test subjects have been studied interacting with the selfdriving Aurrigo pods .
David Keene, CEO of Aurrigo, said: “Safety is at the heart of our autonomous technology and our close working relationship with JLR meant we could quickly accommodate ‘virtual eyes’ on to a number of our pods to facilitate this important study.
“The valuable information will be used as part of the UK Autodrive programme and will also shape future developments in how we bring self-driving vehicles on to the pavements, streets and roads of the UK and overseas.”