Autonomous driving will become commonplace on roads around the world within a few years. Still no one dares to predict the exact moment, but driving without hands in certain conditions is already a reality in some countries and cities that are pioneers in the adoption of this technology. In the United States, for example, the company Waymo offers a completely autonomous taxi service in cities such as San Francisco or Phoenix and has announced that it will soon also do so in Los Angeles or Austin.
These self-driving cars are equipped with a variety of sensors, cameras and radar systems that allow them to detect and respond to their surroundings without human intervention. Their sophisticated navigation and control systems allow them to calculate routes, avoid obstacles and ensure the safety of passengers and other road users. However, despite these technological advances, accidents related to autonomous driving are still recorded, which underlines that there is still a long way to go until it is 100% safe.
One of the main challenges for autonomous driving to advance successfully and consolidate in cities where it is already being implemented is to prevent the cameras and sensors, that is, the eyes of the car, from being deceived. In this sense, there have been reported cases of autonomous vehicles that have confused the speed limitation signs that trucks have on their backs and have slowed down unnecessarily.
An illustrative example of this problem occurred recently in San Francisco, where an engineer has announced through the social network X the result of an experiment he carried out to evaluate the ability of autonomous vehicles to correctly recognize traffic signs. .
In this experiment, the engineer – a former Tesla and Apple employee – put on a T-shirt with a screen-printed image of a stop sign. His mission was to get close to the autonomous vehicles that were circulating, so he had to get close to the road.
This action caused the autonomous vehicle’s perception systems to misinterpret the T-shirt sign as a real traffic sign in three of the four recordings posted by user @S3XYengineering on X.
The test was carried out both day and night, with lower lighting conditions, to evaluate the effectiveness of the detection systems in different situations. On the first two occasions, the robotaxi stops completely when passing by the engineer. On the third occasion, he passes by and on the last one, although he brakes slightly, he continues his march.
The author of the experiment accompanied the 40-second video with the following comment that encourages other people to imitate it as if it were a viral challenge: “A fun way to drive self-driving cars. Print the STOP sign on your t-shirt.”
