Everyone knows when you get angry in traffic. But how should autonomous vehicles react to this?
The Road rage is there, even if only a few want to admit it. That is why researchers at University of Warwick in England working on training self-driving cars to recognize and avoid traffic frenzy.
The university’s researchers published a study this week describing the typical reactions that angry people at the wheel have. In this way, one wants to help autonomous vehicles to react appropriately. According to the researchers, angry people drive faster, make more mistakes and endanger others.
Especially at the beginning of commercialization mixed traffic prevail: autonomous and conventional cars. This is the first study that quantitatively and systematically records aggressive driving behavior. Understanding unpredictable behavior, including angry or impaired driving behavior, could be relevant to the coexistence of self-driving cars and humans.
Researchers say angry drivers reportedly drive about 5 kilometers per hour faster than the traffic around them and make about 2.5 times more errors at the wheel. The researchers did not observe the travelers on the roads. No, about 1,800 respondents were asked to recall driving when angry. They reported on their driving behavior. This means that this data could deviate from reality.
Still, it can be helpful to create parameters for how self-driving systems might react to future volatile drivers and what they need to do then. According to the World Health Organization, about 1.3 million people died on roads worldwide in 2019, and human error caused about 90 percent these fatal accidents. Getting a better picture of what drivers do when they’re upset can help save lives.