Autonomous Cars Adopting Safety Lessons From Aerospace Tech
Off late there has been plenty of research happening to identify safe and effective answers, as to how safety systems in autonomous cars can recognize driver inattention and thereon. And one such solution that popped was the indirect application of aerospace technology. The cue here is to understand the assumptions to key components from aviation and assess [if] they apply to autonomous cars.
The big difference is that, the aviation industry has a tendency for a high-skilled, highly-trained operator in an operating domain where things happen in minutes. Cars have low-skill operators, and things happen in fractions of seconds. It is very hard to oversee a highly automated system, due to circumstances arising from vigilance issues. Although it can effectively be managed through true human systems engineering, where a human is a key component of the design process and you are building the automation to be a strategic teammate with the human.
In essence, leveraging machine intelligence, which is not exactly too flexible but good at making moment-to-moment control decisions with human intelligence – which is a lot more flexible in nature and capable of adapting in real time to situations that it hasn’t observed before.