BBC Radio features dRISK on the development of safe self-driving cars using Edge Cases

Rav Babbra, dRISK’s Business Development Manager has been speaking to Ankur Desai Live on BBC Radio about slow progress towards driverless cars in the UK and how the UK government plans to have confidence in their ability and safety in all driving conditions.

Cars are starting to become more and more technically complex and many now come standard with Advanced Driving Assistance Systems such as automatic cruise control, emergency braking and lane departure warning. Some more bespoke vehicles are now available with Autopilot which are a big step towards self driving technology, but how do we know that they are safe in all the situations our roads throw at them?

A human driver is subjected to a driving test, which gives some confidence in the drivers ability, but how will driverless cars be tested and how will we be sure that they will act safely in all manner of situations?

Rav talks about how dRISK are collecting Edge Cases from all over the world, these are the non normal situations that a driver will encounter leading to a near miss or accident. These are re-created in simulation and presented to an Autonomous Vehicle in test. The simulations can be altered to create further test cases, i.e. weather, lighting, speeds and angles of approach. dRISK also overlay one edge case onto another to create further test scenarios, a process known as recombination. These can be used to test, train and validate the safety of the Autonomous vehicle ensuring the safety of the occupants and other road users. dRISK have recently presented their results after training an AV on their Edge Case data, which was a proven 6 times faster detection of high risk scenarios with twice the confidence.

dRISK.ai are the lead organisation on a UK government grant funded £3M project, working with Claytex, Imperial College London and DG Cities and delivering this driving test in early 2022.

Ankur inadvertently raised Edge Cases of his own after watching the recent ‘Fast and Furious’ movie and asked about parachutes in the road, which Rav confirmed are already featured as a test scenario in dRISK’s complex Knowledge Graph of edge cases.

You can listen to the show here – forward to 2hr.34m.20s to listen to the conversation.