#selfdriving

#selfdriving

Adding Googly Eyes to Self-Driving Cars Can Reduce AccidentsA new study from the University of Tokyo has discovered a possible way to improve pedestrian safety, especially during busy commute hours. All it takes is a pair of large, googly eyes.Yes, you’ve read that right– these fun and weird little trinkets can actually help avoid road accidents. The team recruited several people to participate in virtual reality (VR) scenarios to test if they would cross the road in front of a moving vehicle. They found out that the subjects actually made safer or more efficient choices when the vehicle had… googly eyes on them. Note that the eyes were robotic though, and looked at the pedestrian as it registered their presence. There was a difference between genders, which surprised Chia-Ming Chang, one of the members of the research team. “While other factors like age and background might have also influenced the participants’ reactions, we believe this is an important point, as it shows that different road users may have different behaviors and needs, that require different communication ways in our future self-driving world.”Image credit: Chang et.al #googlyeyes #research #technology #cars #selfdriving #UniversityofTokyo

John Deere's New Self-Driving, Autonomous Tractor Costs $500,000 and Can be Controlled from a PhoneTesla’s self-driving car may be all the rage, but for Minnesota farmer Doug Nimz, that’s old news: he’s been testing autonomous technology on his 2,000-acre corn and soybean farm for John Deere for four years.In early January, John Deere announced its fully autonomous farming tractor to the world in CES 2022. Rather than creating a wholly brand-new tractor, the company improved its popular self-steering 8R tractor by adding two things: a 12 stereo camera system and an Nvidia GPU that let the farmer control the tractor from a smartphone.John Deere’s autonomous tractor system relies on a camera pod of 3 pairs of stereo cameras located at the front of the tractor. The cameras act like human eyes: images taken by the left- and right-side cameras are combined to let the tractor identify obstacles 45 to 90 feet ahead.While an autonomous tractor would surely help the agriculture industry, where labor is an ever-present problem, John Deere is not without its critics. For one, the new autonomous tractor is priced at $500,000 - a cost that puts it out-of-reach of many small farmers.#selfdriving #tractor #JohnDeere #autonomousvehicle #farming