Robo-cars twitch out of control

Autonomous vehicles have “epileptic seizures”!

Final opponent for robo-cars: blue light

(Bild: Fabian Kirchbauer/SP-X)

There are still many obstacles to overcome on the road to truly functioning autonomous mobility. Now another one is making the rounds: the camera systems of autonomous cars are still far from being fully developed - they are not blue light-proof.

Video games and movies often warn in the opening credits of the risk of epileptic seizures due to stroboscopic effects on the screen or TV. Apparently, flickering flashes of light are not only a problem for humans, but also for self-driving cars. As researchers at Israel's Negev University have now discovered, the blue light of emergency vehicles can completely disorient them.

Epilepticar instead of epileptic
In their recently published study, the researchers gave the phenomenon a fitting name: Epilepticar - a compound of "epilepsy" and "car". They investigated how five camera-based environment recognition systems for autonomous driving react to 14 different light patterns of emergency vehicles. The result: all of them were irritated to a greater or lesser extent by the beacons. According to the researchers, the flickering light distorts the colors and contours of vehicles, for example, to such an extent that the image recognition software can no longer correctly disentangle the camera image.

The phenomenon is dangerous in the eyes of the researchers, as it can cause accidents in the vicinity of emergency vehicles. In addition, the effect could easily be used for criminal attacks. Improved AI image recognition software could provide a remedy. The researchers have developed a variant and given it a name: Caracetamol, based on the well-known painkiller.

The study is also interesting because there have recently been more than a dozen accidents in the USA involving self-driving Tesla e-cars and emergency vehicles. A total of 15 people were injured, one even fatally. Tesla also primarily uses cameras for environment recognition - however, the Californian company's system was not tested as part of the study.