Emergency Vehicle Lights Can Screw Up a Car’s Automated Driving System
Carmakers say their increasingly sophisticated automated driving systems make driving safer and less stressful by leaving some of the hard work of knowing when a crash is about to happen—and avoiding it—to the machines. But new research suggests some of these systems might do the virtual opposite at the worst possible moment.
A new paper from researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu Limited demonstrates that when some camera-based automated driving systems are exposed to the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, they can no longer confidently identify objects on the road. The researchers call the phenomenon a “digital epileptic seizure”—epilepticar for short—where the systems, trained by artificial intelligence to distinguish between images of different road objects, fluctuate in effectiveness in time with the emergency lights’ flashes. The effect is especially apparent in darkness, the researchers say.
Emergency lights, in other words, could make automated driving systems less sure that the car-shaped thing in front of them is actually a car. The researchers write that the flaw “poses a significant risk” because it could potentially cause vehicles with automated driving systems enabled to “crash near emergency vehicles" and “be exploited by adversaries to cause such accidents.”
