The Google sister Waymo Driver is compared to attentive drivers and research is being conducted with Swiss Re on insurance for autonomous driving.
Waymo is the top dog among the participants in the autonomous driving industry and this is now to be underlined with a comparison. Autonomous driving, as people never tire of emphasizing, can increase road safety. But the question is: How do you define that? A Waymo concept compares the Waymo Driver to an observant human.
The Response Time white paper analyzes Waymo’s reaction to an imminent road accident situation. The comparative value represents an alert and undisturbed human avoiding collisions. On this scale, the Collision Avoidance Benchmarking Paper uses a new method to examine the ability of autonomous vehicles to react. According to Waymo, it is the only reference model that depicts an ideal human driving condition. This ideal image is a person who always drives attentively and does not allow himself to be distracted, tired or under the influence of alcohol: the NIEON model.
The data showed that the Waymo driver outperformed the NIEON human driver model by avoiding more collisions and reducing the risk of serious injuries in simulated fatal accident scenarios.
So far, the comparison to the human reaction has been recorded in an artificial environment. The reaction time to a tone or the brake light is evaluated. However, this requires behavior that conforms to the rules, which is not always the case. The pressure is also hardly taken into account when traffic situations occur unexpectedly and quickly.
Waymo therefore wants to establish its benchmarking as a standard. It is based on two basic concepts: the driver’s expectation is related to the reaction time and that the reaction depends on the dynamically evolving situation. In slow scenarios, people often react too slowly.
This benchmark compared people involved in fatal accidents in Chandler between 2008 and 2017 to the Waymo driver. The result was that the computer would have avoided the accidents. Other studies concluded that the Waymo Driver would have prevented more than half of potentially avoidable fatal collisions. By braking or swerving, the NIEON model prevented 62.5 percent of these accidents and reduced the risk of serious injury by 84 percent.
Waymo and Swiss Re
Waymo and Swiss Re, a reinsurer, are collaborating on insurance research. This involves new methods of risk assessment to insure autonomous driving. The guidance for the assessment of the risks is necessary in view of the automation of driving, since it is a game opportunity.
Human-centric vehicle safety is changing with automation, so data is also needed to measure risks associated with autonomous driving technology. The research project of the two companies wants to remedy this.