Waymo, a self-driving car developer under Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced the results of an experiment that simulates an accident that occurred in the U.S. traffic accident-prone area on March 8, 2021 (local time). Among them, Waymo Driver, Waymo’s autonomous driving technology, reports that accidents can be prevented with a high probability even in scenes where human drivers cause traffic accidents.
Trent Victor Waymo, head of safety research, says that there is a lot of research on the safety of autonomous vehicles, but there are not many studies on the consequences of autonomous vehicles in situations where humans cause accidents. He conducted a simulation using the results of the Waymo road driving test, which covers 32.86 million miles, and statistical survey data related to actual traffic accidents.
Waymo’s team first extracted the records of an accident investigation in Maricopa County, Arizona, from the data released by the US Department of Transportation’s Road and Traffic Safety Administration, which has the highest incidence of pedestrian deaths in the United States. A collection of information about a fatal crash between 2008 and 2017 in the county city of Chandler.
In addition, the simulation that assumed the case that the car driver on the side of the perpetrator who caused the traffic accident was the Waymo driver was divided into 52 patterns. As a result, the probability of a Waymo driver avoiding a collision in an accident has reached 100%.
For example, in an accident simulation result in which a vehicle speeding at an intersection and entering by neglecting a signal collided with a vehicle on the victim’s side that entered a green light road intersection, replacing the driver of the vehicle causing the accident with a Waymo driver will not enter the original red light intersection and overspeed. Accidents cannot happen because they do not cause them.
In a similar situation, if the victim’s vehicle was replaced with a Waymo driver, the Waymo driver was able to accurately recognize the movement of the vehicle that caused the accident, ignoring the signal and rushing to the intersection at high speed, and reduce the speed in advance to avoid a collision.
As a result of the simulation, assuming that the victim’s vehicle was a Waymo driver, the collision was completely resolved in 82% and the accident scale decreased in 10%. According to the report, as 94% of accidents are caused by human error, they believe that traffic safety can be improved by replacing human drivers with Waymo drivers. Related information can be found here.