Driverless cars still need a human touch

Posted By Amit Samaiyar

Driverless cars still need a human touch: For the people having the interest in cars, after hearing industry executives discussing the self-driving technology being incorporated into their vehicle, might be spared for thinking robotic cars will soon drive themselves out of showrooms.

In a news media event on January 7, Carlos Ghosn, the chairman and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan Alliance at the company’s research laboratory in Silicon Valley announced that Nissan would come up with 10 new autonomous vehicles in the next 4 years.

In a conference call with reporters last week, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla asserted that the so-called Autopilot feature introduced in the Tesla Model S last Autumn was probably better than a person right now.

What Ghosn and Musk are describing cross-country driving hyperbole aside are cars with smart capabilities that can help drive or even take over in tricky situations.

There is no doubt autonomous cars that do all the work are still, at least, a decade away from carrying people around the city, like the bubble-shaped vehicles Google has been testing near its Silicon Valley Campus.

But this self-driving cars will require human supervision, on occasions, the car will in effect still tell their human drives, “Here, You take the wheel” when they encounter complex driving situations or state of emergency.

Driverless cars still need a human touch

In the automotive industry, this is often termed to as the handoff problem, and automotive engineers know that there is no easy solution. Automotive designers have not yet found a way to make a driver who often distracted by texting, reading email or watching a movie perk up and retake control of the car in the fraction of a second that is required in an emergency. The danger is that by inducing human drivers to pay even less attention to driving, the safety technology may be creating new hazards. Don’t Miss: Meet the World’s First Smart Bra “The whole issue of interacting with people inside and outside the car exposes real issues in artificial intelligence,” said John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The ability to know if the driver is ready and are you giving them enough notice to hand off is a really tricky question.”