Autonomous car company Nuro, which makes car-like autonomous vehicles that drive on roads and deliver pizza and groceries primarily in suburban-like environments, has unveiled a new vehicle model that it says is ready for mass production, "It's about 20 percent smaller in width than a typical passenger car," which "gives cyclists and pedestrians more room to maneuver next to the robot." However, if the robot hits the aforementioned cyclist or pedestrian, it has an extra function: a massive external airbag.
Nuro's Medium post about the new robot says: "A custom external pedestrian airbag that spans the front of the robot is optimized to reduce the impact force and the number of injuries in the event of a collision. The next sentence states that the car's top speed is every 45 mph, which according to Nuro is a "low speed" that "reduces the severity of any potential impact" but also "allows the car to reach more customers and serve more on the wider road" enterprise".
First of all, 45 mph is not a "low speed" to be hit by a car. According to a 2011 AAA study, the risk of serious injury is 50 percent when hit by a car traveling at 42 mph, and 75 percent at 50 mph.
Nuro was founded by two former executives of Google's self-driving car division. It currently has limited partnerships with Domino's and Krogers to deliver in the Houston area. It also received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to operate a driverless delivery service in some Bay Area communities. Some competitors use smaller robots that are slower but drive on the pavement.
We have good reason to suspect that these airbags are nothing more than safety drama. The post doesn't provide any information on how airbags work, a critical piece of information given the difficulty of effective exterior airbag engineering.
Interior airbags save lives because they soften the so-called "second shock," when a car occupant smashes into the steering wheel, dashboard, or windshield. To prevent this second impact, the airbags inflate after sensors on the car detect a collision. In about 30 milliseconds or less, the airbag inflates, providing a cushion between the driver and the car's hard interior surface. Airbags work because they have time to inflate between the first and second impact.
But in order to be effective, the external airbags must be inflated before the first impact. In other words, robots must predict the future. If it could do that, maybe it would be better to avoid hitting people altogether.
Many cars today have collision detection technology that automatically warns or applies the brakes when the car thinks it is about to hit something. And this can indeed be a life-saving technology. However, anyone who has used a car with this feature knows that it can also produce many false positives and false negatives. Thanks to this flawed technology, "Phantom Braking" has become a phenomenon in modern cars.
While external airbags are theoretically better than no airbags in the case of a robot hitting a pedestrian or bicyclist, it also reinforces the expectation that the robot will hit a human, an unavoidable part of autonomous vehicle operation. , just like crashes are an inevitable part of driving a car. It's perhaps a more honest approach than we're used to hearing from the AV industry, but it's also very different from the future it's been selling. Once upon a time, the self-driving car industry boasted that their cars would be so safe that crashes would be eliminated entirely. Now, they have to wrap their cars with pillows, which seems like a very long time.
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