Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos(theguardian.com) |
Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos(theguardian.com) |
As an aside, kangaroos in motion are one of the most efficient and elegant mammals. I love watching them bounding away at speed effortlessly dodging scrub and trees - more like flight than running.
I grew up in Alaska and when you ran into a moose you weren't allowed to keep it. Instead there was a volunteer crew that was called to clean it up, compensated with the corpse (which is how I grew up on moose).
Of course, that is assuming you are still OK after hitting one - Kangaroos are BIG critters and can do considerable damage to the vehicle (and occupants) in a collision.
This was in an environment where daytime temperatures are often 40C (104F) plus during the day.
But Roo's need to be bled properly otherwise the meat goes to hell. You can get away with eating fresh tail, but really a roadkill roo wouldn't be very nice.
Plus, after 30 minutes in the sun, it'd be no good for anyone other than the flies.
The hopping movement makes it incredibly difficult to judge their speed and direction. They actually cover horizontal space at a far greater clip than they seem to, and also means they can make snap changes in their direction of travel VERY quickly, making any avoidance manoeuvre a bit of a wild guess.
Unpredictable motion is ideal for evading upright preditors with spears, but no so good for collision avoidance with fast moving metal objects.
Shouldn't the car stop for any obstacle, even ones it doesn't recognise? They surely can't expect to train it on every possible type of debris.
I wonder how it it handles low-flying birds.
In Sweden there are elks and deer but not so many kangaroos. :)
An intelligent system needs to learn. To learn it needs examples.
I think I know how to interpret that sentence...
An old favourite of mine, presumably apocryphal, involving kangaroos and the dangers of reusing code:
Who wouldn't be confused?
h/t Gary Matthews, elsewhere.
Imagine a 700kg (1,500 pound) moose with velvety brown fur suddenly wanting to cross the road at night in front of your car when you are traveling 120km/h (74mph).
That weight is all up high too on spindly legs. It's like running into a high table with 700kg of weigh on it.
Emus have the added bonus too of running directly at you when you sound the horn, instead of away as you'd expect. It's quite uncanny, and problematic at a hundred kilometres an hour.
On a more realistic level, stereoscopic vision seems like a pretty decent way to get distances.
Humans do pretty good with fuzzy notions of where the animal is. Exact distances aren't needed so much as reasonable estimates. If it is probably in the "need to brake zone" then the car brakes. Plus or minus a few meters isn't a big deal so long as you've got margins to work with. As animals are unpredictable, Volvo certainly has wide margins.
Most demo's only show human interaction.
Edit: and what about flying trash, leaves and so on? Thinking about it there are a lot of object types we interact with. Leaves for example mean nothing to us because they won't harm us. And we know crows will fly away. But pigeons on the other hand..
- health: most people don’t know how to process raw meat or recognize a sick animal (rabies or other illnesses)
- safety: those animals are tough, it’s not uncommon for boars to wake up from the concussion before, while, or after being loaded in a car, and the last thing you want while driving is a wild, fearful, angry animal suddenly waking up and ripping your car apart from the inside while you’re driving (happens).
- law: hunting is regulated so as to control wild animal population growth, killing some has to be reported one way or another.
I suspect there is another historical reason, akin to why you can be prosecuted for attempting to obliterate your own existence: your own being is basically owned by the Republic (used to be the King), so committing suicide is a prejudice to the State. I can see something like this being in effect: wild animals are a property of the State, and killing them even with your car is poaching. That may be why you’re supposed to turn the corpse to the Gendarmerie (cops branch of the military).
(IANAL, correct me if I’m wrong, that just what I’ve been taught as a kid growing in a rural area full of forests)
Also you can get kangaroo meat cheaply at most butchers. It's just like venison.
It is quite divisive though, some people enjoy the taste, myself included, but others have a strong dislike. It is high in protein so often enjoyed by gym-going types.
Wallabies are like 1/5 or less in size/weight when compared to kangaroos, they are small animals I would say comparable in size/weight to a large rabbit.
The car was a not so small car, a Holden Torana, a V8 4.2 liters, if I recall correctly, still the hit was very hard and the australian guy that was driving didn't manage to keep the car on the road and we ended up in the field nearby.
No physical harm to anyone on the car, but the fender and front of the car were seriously damaged.
I wouldn't have wanted to have hit a full-sized kangaroo instead of the poor little wallaby.
(When in driving school, I was taught to ignore anything smaller than a reindeer - but assure whoever showed up in distress after I'd put a set of tire marks over their pet's back that I'd tried my best to avoid it.)
The things seem to be able to effortlessly execute 90 degree turns between hops, at speed.
Safety lesson: if you see kangaroos travelling alongside the road you're driving on, slow way down so you can execute an emergency stop, if needed; they're always only one hop from suddenly being right in front of you.
Safety lesson 2: there is always another kangaroo. If you see a kangaroo bound across the road ahead of you, slow way down; there's likely to be another kangaroo a very short distance behind it. (And safety lesson 2 recurses and also applies to that second kangaroo; there is likely a third kangaroo just far enough behind it that you'll think there's no third kangaroo. And so on.)
I'm not surprised they get hit as often as they do particularly at night.