Vehicle-human handover at Level 3 still an unsolved challenge on path to autonomous vehicles

The road to fully autonomous cars is littered with obstacles. The unleashing of Level 4 robo-taxis in San Francisco caused a bit of chaos and prompted local authorities to ask General Motors to reduce its Cruise fleet in the city by half.

Although Mercedes has launched its Level 3 cars in parts of California, Nevada and Germany, there are at least as many doubters of the technology as there are of these vehicles on the road. This has made Level 3 autonomy a more dubious stage on the road to full autonomy than its presumed successor, Level 4.

The essential difference between the two systems is that Level 3 still depends on the driver, while there is no role for a human being in Level 4, unless it’s the technician who is called when the vehicle malfunctions. The problem with Level 3 is, in fact, the human and the so-called handover, or handoff, when the car is in a situation the technology cannot handle and alerts the driver to take back control within 10 seconds.

In a paper provided by Missy Cummings, professor at George Mason University and director of Mason’s Autonomy and Robotics Center, she describes several situations in which drivers are asked to take control within seconds:

• Camera vision systems lose the ability to localize due to problems such as missing or faded white lane lines, moisture and/or precipitation in the air, low sun angles and resulting shadows.
• Missed obstacle detection due to limited sensor capability, such as the ‘sudden reveal’ that occurs when one car is following another and the lead car suddenly shifts lanes, revealing an obstacle in the road ahead. This has caused several Tesla incidents, resulting in both fatal and non-fatal accidents.
• Erroneous obstacle detection because of the inherent imperfection of sensors, for example, when a LiDAR sensor detects an artificial obstacle, such as a plastic bag floating in the air, causing the car to suddenly engage the brakes. This would cause following cars driven by humans to respond and potentially cause an accordion effect in high-density traffic.

To read the complete article, visit TU-Automotive.