r communicates with people and things around it.
Communication, like deep learning, is crucial, according to Reiley and Tandon.
Cars, regardless of what system they’re operating, will need to be able to communicate with one another just as people will need to be able to understand the cars’ intentions. As the self-driving space becomes increasingly crowded with the entrance of legacy and new transportation players, standardizing that communication becomes trickier.
Communication, according to Tandon, is also an important method of gaining the trust of the public. After all, consumer trust — like the reliability and legislative approval of the technology — can either be the ultimate impediment to the deployment of self-driving or it can be what expedites it.
“We believe [a standard] needs to exist,” Tandon said. “Cars today have break lights, horns, rear-view mirrors, side-view mirrors — but all those standards developed over time. Our belief with the self-driving car is that a similar transformation will have to occur. For example, we may have to replace the human hand signals, like the wave.”
Already, Tandon and his team have been discussing implementing a standard method of communication with his existing partners.
“We’re still trying to figure out what that standard even is,” he said. “But to me, it’s just a fundamental part of the problem of self-driving cars.”
To that end, the company’s “kit,” which can be retrofitted to existing vehicles, includes LED signs that sit atop the car and speakers that relay the car’s intentions to pedestrians and human drivers around it. (Naturally, the kit is also equipped with sensors like radar, GPS, cameras and Lidar, though Reiley said the team considers Lidar to be more of a redundancy than a necessary part of the system.)
The company is still testing different methods of communication to measure things like how quickly and how well people respond to the audio-visual cues. For example, do pedestrians notice the LED sign that says that it’s safe to cross, or do they need an extra sound or voice?
Using deep learning to power that part of the system, Tandon said, allows it to learn how to communicate in a way that a pedestrian and another human driver might understand.