Can Drivers Assist Their Own Driver Assistance Systems?

Can Drivers Assist Their Own Driver Assistance Systems?

Until cars can take over the driving entirely, we humans will just have to share the job with them, exploiting the strengths and masking the weaknesses peculiar to each side—carbon and silicon.

The biggest human weakness may well be our tendency to be lulled into complacency by robots that drive perfectly almost, but not quite all, of the time. One of the biggest machine weaknesses is in making certain judgment calls. (They’re not great at spotting potholes, for instance.)

Most researchers are so intent on getting driver-assistance systems to stand alone that they dismiss human behavior as mere noise in the system. But some boffins at Berkeley want to make full use of that behavior by telling the machines when to defer to the driver.

Call it driver assistance for driver assistance.

“It’s incredibly important to include the human, not just as something to consider as a disturbance,” says Katherine Driggs Campbell, who is leading the project. She is a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, under the supervision of professor Ruzena Bajcsy.

The researchers use cameras to monitor posture, head, and eye movements. (A Microsoft Kinect determines posture by measuring the position of a person’s joints.) Those measurements are fed into a model that processes them so the automated systems can guess when people are losing their concentration. That’s when the robot stops deferring and starts intervening. 

“It’s sometimes hard to tell from body position whether the driver is using a phone or just holding it up,” Campbell says. “Now, in our most recent iteration, we can pull information from the phone as well, to see if you’re actually using it.”

Read more : http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/can-drivers-assist-their-own-driver-assistance-systems