Swedish automaker Volvo, another participant among industry giants in the growing autonomous sector, admitted to having trouble with the systems of their self-driving vehicles in detecting a peculiar road hazard….
Kangaroos.
Back in June, Volvo was conducting early tests of its autonomous car models, which they hope will be publicly available by 2020, in the Australian Outback. Although the vehicle’s “Large Animal Detection System” could identify animals like deer, elk, and caribou, kangaroos were a little more….problematic. According to results from these early rounds of tests, the vehicle’s large animal detection system couldn’t adjust to the kangaroo’s unique movement methods from its bounce-like motions. One of the main attributing factors behind these circumstances are because the vehicle’s object detection systems use the ground as their point of reference, meaning the kangaroo’s hopping made it increasingly difficult to determine the animal’s exact distance from the driverless car. The video below provides a visual on how the autonomous Volvo model’s detection systems reacted to kangaroo’s hopping movements while testing was conducted.
