Self-Driving Cars Must Learn the Language of Cyclists to Keep Roads Safe

ACM TECHNEWS

Self-Driving Cars Must Learn the Language of Cyclists to Keep Roads Safe

By University of Glasgow (U.K.) April 28, 2023 

Dashboard of a self-driving car.

Said Stephen Brewster of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, “Cars and bikes share the same spaces on the roads, which can be dangerous – between 2015 and 2020, 84% of fatal bike accidents involved a motor vehicle."

Credit: readwrite.com

A study of communications between drivers and cyclists by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Glasgow suggests new autonomous vehicle (AV) systems must be able to replicate those social interactions to ensure safety on the road.

The researchers said integrated displays on the exterior of AVs, or traffic-light-colored LEDs on the edges of the vehicles, could help indicate their intentions, while cyclists could wear smart glasses that allow direct communications from AVs in the form of vibrations.

The researchers found cyclists rely on road signs and traffic signals in controlled intersections, but look at cars to assess drivers' intentions in roundabouts, uncontrolled intersections, and construction areas.

From University of Glasgow (U.K.) ... '

Bikes Existing Among Cars

Troublesome thought that bicycles might need to become so complex to exist in an ecosystem with automobiles.

Bikes May Have to Talk to Self-Driving Cars for Safety's Sake     by Margaret J. Krauss

Researchers envision bicycles communicating with autonomous vehicles so the latter can predict cyclists' movements. Waymo's self-driving autos have honed their predictive abilities over many simulated and actual driven miles, notes Waymo's Nathaniel Fairfield. Waymo's vehicles are programmed to pass bikes in compliance with state laws, or to wait if such action is impossible. Carnegie Mellon University professor Anthony Rowe wants bikes to feed data to cars. "We're trying to...put as much instrumentation on a bike as we can to see if we can predict how it's going to move in the future, so that it could, for example, signal a collision-warning system on a car," Rowe says. His team wants to collect as much information as possible to determine the precise and constant position of a bike in the world, and then determine the least amount of data a car requires from a cyclist for it to trigger an automatic braking system .... "