Audi makes its newest self-driving car a bit more human to be a better machine.
The most recent version of Audi’s endeavour to develop more and more intelligent vehicles capable of autonomous operation, called Audi Piloted Driving, has been fitted to an A7 called ‘Jack’.
The difference here is that Audi claims to have figured out a way for Jack to behave like a human driver, considering the behaviours and idiosyncrasies of other drivers when executing its autonomous driving manoeuvres.
Examples of this are keeping more of a gap when following behind trucks or buses, as we drivers typically do. And when switching lanes, Jack activates its turn signal and moves closer to the edge of the lane first before committing to the full lane switch – just like we would. This programming is actually to benefit the human drivers that it will be sharing a road with.
Audi is currently in the process of repeated tests on Germany’s A9 Autobahn, refining the car’s central driver assistance controller (Jack’s brain, so to speak) which they call zFAS. It gathers information from a wide array of sensors and fed to high performance processors, effectively painting a model of its surrounding in order to navigate.
You may think that’s to Audi’s detriment, to drive like humans would. The same error-prone humans that are responsible for the overwhelming bulk of road accidents since the advent of the automobile.
Because autonomous vehicles are still in only available in very, very few numbers and the majority of those not yet available on civilian-owned cars, these new self driving cars must adapt to the whims of the human drivers it will be surrounded by.
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