In life, whether the situation involves family, friends, work or school, good communication is vital to success. Turns out that may also be true for self-driving vehicles.
Ford human factors specialist John Shutko recently published a summary of the automaker's' experiments using a windshield lightbar to communicate self-driving intent. In partnership with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Ford has run trials in both virtual reality and real urban environments to gauge the effectiveness of communication between vehicles and pedestrians.
The system consists of an LED bar that spans the top of the windshield
What's more, Ford encourages other self-driving developers to join together in creating an industry standard for communication between self-driving cars and the surrounding environment.
Today, we’re calling on all self-driving vehicle developers, automakers and technology companies who are committed to deploying SAE level-4 vehicles — and believe these vehicles should communicate intent — to join us and share ideas to create an industry standard for communicating driving intent, whether it be driving, yielding or accelerating from a stop."
Ford plans to roll out the communications device on Argo AI self-driving vehicles in Miami, as well as further test scenarios in Europe, to test cross-culture reactions.
One of Ford's philosophical viewpoints is that the surrounding world should not have to change their behavior to accommodate self-driving cars.
After all, ensuring self-driving vehicles are integrated into society without overwhelming or confusing anyone is what success looks like."
This is an exciting start to the communication between self-driving cars and pedestrians. The necessity of these communication approaches, however, is an open question as self-driving vehicles begin to appear in larger numbers.
Waymo and Aptiv self-driving vehicles, which are testing in Arizona and Nevada, respectively, lack this type of communication. That does not appear to have hindered their effectiveness so far.
Human-driven vehicles lack this level of communication, as well, and there is a school of thought that the behavior of self-driving cars should mimic the behavior of human drivers as closely as possible.
The nearest analogy to the Ford light bar is the automotive lighting already required in vehicles - turn signals and brake lights. These lights emerged organically in the early 20th century and were only codified into a standard much later.
This tension between de facto (by fact) and de jure (by law) standards is common in the world of software and technology. Often de facto standards win in practice and are later codified into de jure regulations.
So Ford's best shot at the adoption of a communications standard for intent might be to put a lot of self-driving cars out on the road and gain the de facto embrace of its approach.
