When Mobileye set out to design a safety concept for autonomous vehicles (AVs), we first had to examine the concepts and mechanisms that humans use to maintain road safety. We needed a framework fully compliant with the human road safety system so that AVs could share the same roads. We also needed something demonstrably safer, by design, for society to accept them on the roads.
During development of this system, we discovered the same framework that solves this challenge for AVs is also capable of dramatically improving the safety of the road today via advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The solution digitizes the mostly informal, hard-to-enforce social contract that governs road safety today. How this works was the subject of my keynote address today at SAE World Congress.
The Gap in Our Traffic Rules
The foundation of the existing road safety system is traffic rules: explicit, unequivocal instructions to the driver, coded through on-road and road-side signs and indicators such as traffic lights, stop signs, lane dividers, etc.
More: Autonomous Driving at Intel | Mobileye News | Erez Dagan Keynote at SAE World Congress
Still, traffic rules are an under-defined system. Even if all agents rigorously follow them there is still a risk of road accidents. This is because the alternative – to over-define with traffic lights at every junction (no roundabouts) and by making every lane line always solid – would be costly and degrade traffic flow to impractical levels.
Dashed lane lines and yield signs allow for more efficiency, but also leave points of potential conflict in which road users must negotiate with one another (for example, when changing lanes or at a four-way stop). Had these negotiations been left completely unregulated, the outcomes would be a wild function of the different agents’ time-utility and risk-averseness.
This is where the social contract comes in.
The social contract governing careful driving is meant to compensate for the safety gap left by the fact that the traffic rules are under-determined. It minimizes the occurrence of time-critical conflicts and regulates negotiations between road users by directing agents to keep a safe distance from the car ahead, to proceed with caution when visibility is compromised, to give up the right of way if others claim it, and so on. It is a social contract in the sense that we all uphold this unspoken set of rules because we are all better off if we do.
The social contract supersedes traffic rules and can therefore remedy the consequences of traffic rule violations. For example, the social contract would allow an agent to cross a solid lane line if a vehicle in the opposite lane has crossed it right in front him (as long as it does not lead to a different social contract violation).
Despite its critical role in the human road safety system, the social contract for cautious driving has shortcomings. It is broad, without specific definitions of what is safe or appropriate, leaving the correct application up to real-time human judgments. Hence, a lapse of judgment is a leading cause of accidents. The social contract is also nearly impossible to enforce, since detecting a violation requires detailed analysis of a traffic situation.
Please click here to view the full press release.
SOURCE: Intel
