Self-driving cars must be more aware to reach their true potential

DUBAI: Self-driving cars and delivery robots have huge potential to reshape last-mile mobility, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to learn to interact with humans and develop a level of social awareness if they are to operate safely and efficiently.

Autonomous vehicles can improve the lives of those with limited access to mobility, with knock-on benefits for the economy – a topic explored by an expert at a recent Mobility as a Service (MaaS) event at the Switzerland Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, which probed the challenges the technology must overcome before the widespread introduction of autonomous vehicles to market.

Currently, the AI of autonomous vehicles can understand the environment, detect objects such as other vehicles, pedestrians, animals and traffic lights and plan the best trajectory. But predicting ‘surprises’ – such as a pedestrian suddenly veering into the road – and reacting accordingly, is still a work in progress, with almost all accidents involving autonomous vehicles (98 per cent) due to unexpected stops.

That’s why developers are working to combine perception, planning and social forecasting in ‘socially-aware’ AI.

Prof Alexandre Alhi of EPFL said, “While one of the most exciting opportunities with MaaS is to combine it with autonomous vehicles, the AV must be socially and ethically aware, with responsible AI to operate it. How to implement the ethics of AI into MaaS, especially if everything becomes autonomous, is an open question.”

Policymakers could outline rigid rules to apply across the board, or programme the user’s ethics into the autonomous vehicle. In this case, AI would effectively make the same decisions as the driver in each situation, and liability would fall on the individual because they told the machine how to behave.

Prof Alhi added, “The beauty of ethics is that we teach it to kids, so we have simple rules like respecting each other. If you untangle the key concepts behind ethics, it is possible to implement a decision-making process. The AI can’t be seen as good or bad – those definitions relate to free will. Autonomous vehicles will be able to show us they can make decisions out of many options, but these options will still have to be coded.”

Expo 2020 Dubai is showcasing a number of mobility solutions, including ‘tala-bots’ – autonomous food delivery from talabat, Expo’s official food delivery partner.

‘Peering through the MaaS Cloud,’ took place at the Switzerland Pavilion on 13 January as part of Expo’s Transport and Connectivity Week. The event was held in partnership with Swissnex, the Swiss global network for education, research and innovation, and Swiss-based science and technology institution EPFL.

Source: Expo 2020 Website