Testing the Saftey of Smart Cars

Ivan Ang

Greetings from the Australian National University, where Ivan Ang is reporting his research on "User-centric Assessment of Robotic Systems via POMDP Planning of Adversaries". What got my attention was applying this to testing car autonomous driving. Recently I purchased a basic compact car. Despite the low cost, it came with a camera and radar for autonomous breaking, adaptive cruse control and lane keeping. I am trusting my life, and those of other road users, to these systems, so how well are they tested? Ivan pointed out that autonomous breaking was tested by pulling a dummy out in the path of the car on a string. The dummy's arms and legs are fixed, as its speed and direction. The developers of the system can optimize it for this test, but it then might do as well with real people. 

Huston, we have a solution!

Greetings from the AI, ML and Friends Seminar at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Dr. Zak Kingston from Rice University is speaking on "Scaling Multi-Modal Planning".

That doesn't sound very exciting, but he is speaking from the USA, where he has been planning how to use a robot on the International Space Station. Robots can help with routine housekeeping tasks, on a space station, and presumably on earth, but it is tedious to have to program the robot to make every tiny motion. That works fine for a production line, where every car body will be locked into the same place, with an area reserved for the robot. But Dr. Kingston explained a space station is a confined space cluttered with stuff, which gets moved about. He is describing the use of the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) to solve this problem.

Austral autonomous ship
concepts for USN & RAN.

This work has application for the Australian Defence Force. Suppliers to the ADF are working on ships, and submarines designed to be operated without a crew for weeks. These drone submarines and ships will need routine maintenance while at sea, with no one on board. A robot sailor could save the vessel having return to port to have a minor problem fixed.