The next step - testing connected and automated vehicles on real roads

摘要

An elderly lady on a mobility scooter using a broom to chase away a duck. Not a typical scenario one would expect to encounter during vehicle prototype testing. However, in 2014, this unlikely situation confronted one of Google's self-driving cars when out assessing its automated capabilities in the Bay Area, San Francisco. The operation of a road vehicle is a relatively simple, governed by four basic operations - steer left, steer right, speed up, slow down. However, the Google example illustrates the infinite complexity that driving truly entails. Weather, traffic, pedestrians, animals - all may contrive to perplex the sensors and software that guide automated vehicles. Consequently, large datasets of real world driving in a variety of conditions are necessary to provide the substrate upon which these systems can be trained and optimised.