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This is why self driving cars are crashing all the time

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BY KEVIN SAWYER – Self driving cars, it seems, are all over the headlines as many companies look to try and take driving into the supposed robot safety of the 21st Century. Safety, however, seems to be the victim as self driving cars are currently involved in more accidents than those vehicles being driven by humans.

Apparently, according the engineers and the experts that are building these vehicles, the reason seems simple and not so simple. The reason seems to be that the cars are programmed to obey the law at all times. This strategy isn’t working well at all because the cars are unable to adapt to the driving conditions of where they happen to be at a specific time. Merging with oncoming traffic or veering to miss and obstacle doesn’t seem to be a strong suit.

As accident incidents continue to grow, all of them minor right now, engineers and computer programmers from Google to Carnegie Mellon University, are at a dilemma point. The current thinking is whether or not they should program the cars to break the law from time to time in order to avoid more accidents. Should they begin to make the vehicles a little more aggressive without being reckless law breakers?

Raj Rajkumar of Carnegie Mellon said that, “It’s a constant debate inside our group. And, we have basically decided to stick to the speed limit. But when you go out and drive the speed limit on the highway, pretty much everyone on the road is just zipping by you.”

Last year, Rajkumar ran a test with a couple of member of Congress in Washington, DC. He took a couple of them out in his autonomous Cadillac and the car seemed to be doing just fine until it had to merge into traffic on extremely busy I-395. He wanted the Caddy to merge with the traffic and then swing itself over a couple of lanes so they could get off at the exit near the Pentagon.

Trouble was, the car’s sensors and cameras couldn’t figure out if the humans driving the other cars were going to make room for him to do what he needed to do. So, at that point, Rajkumar took over at the wheel and said, “We wanted to be cautious. We don’t want to get into an accident because that would be front page news. People expect more of autonomous cars.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay