A car drives autonomously and decides independently
to change lane and to overtake.
No more need for driver intervention.
Science Fiction has become a reality.
The French company Valeo has long since recognized
this trend:
self-driving cars are going to revolutionise the automotive industry profoundly.
In South Gerrmany, Valeo is testing fully
automated vehicles
on authorised sections of motorway.
Artificial intelligence plays a key role here.
AI is in a position to a process a significantly
higher volume of data – and also, very importantly,
to not only measure situations but also understand
them so as to be able to create the proactive element
that is so essential in automated
driving.
To gain this understanding, the AI needs real
data, generated on measurement vehicles
with the aid of various sensors.
This is because road traffic is too complex
to be successfully captured by a formal set of rules.
To guarantee road safety, an autonomously
propelled vehicle has to be able to recognize
and also classify different objects.
The keys to success here: Machine Learning
and Deep Learning.
Deep Neurol Net, that is, neural networks,
work with a great deal of training data.
In other words, a person perceives their environment
and learns to understand it,
and we’re giving these systems that same kind of understanding.
In Saarbrücken the DFKI, the German Research
Centre for Artificial Intelligence,
is also working on the future of mobility.
The scientists here are taking a different
approach:
Actually our unique selling points are that
we look after the vulnerable road users.
Our work has less to do with motorway traffic
and more with inner-city traffic.
That’s where we’re modelling human behaviour
by using AI.
With a so-called “motion capture suit”,
the researchers collect data
on the walking behaviour of pedestrians.
The data are then fed into the system on board
the autonomous vehicle.
The advantage here is that the car’s artificial
intelligence should, by means of countless
case scenarios, learn how to respond proactively
to pedestrian behaviour.
While industry limits itself to merely detecting
pedestrians,
we’re actually predicting their behaviour.
That gives us a head start of 5 to 7 seconds,
during which we can predict
people’s future behaviour or their future movements.
But it’s going to be some years before vehicles
can drive themselves fully automatically.
There are still many challenges to be overcome
– technological as well as legal.
What I predict is that in ten to twenty years’
time, most of new cars will be equipped
with systems where you can at least partially give
them driving tasks.
If we’re talking about inner-city traffic,
then we’ll certainly need to discuss
structural measures  because the proximity of vulnerable road users prevents driving there
with any high degree of automation.
Artificial intelligence will also revolutionise
many other sectors.
Find out how it can make your production more
autonomous – at AUTOMATICA in Munich.
