Kangaroo "confused" drone car

Kangaroos in Australia are a real disaster for motorists. More than 16 thousand traffic accidents with these animals occur on Australian roads each year: they simply jump out onto the road and there’s no escape from them. Volvo has been developing a system for unmanned vehicles that would have prevented such incidents since 2015. But the features of the movement of the kangaroo prevent the program from determining where exactly the animal is at the moment.

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The task of the system being developed by Volvo is to slow down when it realizes that the kangaroo is in dangerous proximity. But testing the program showed that it does not always correctly determine the distance to the animal. When the kangaroo is standing on the ground, the system "reads" this distance. But if the kangaroo jumped, the system “loses” it, and when it “finds” it again after landing, it cannot match the new coordinates with earlier data.

Now experts are figuring out how to solve this problem. In the future, "anti-kangur" unmanned vehicle software may become useful for ordinary production cars.

Safety for all

Car manufacturers are seriously working on animal detection systems on the road. The same company, Volvo, successfully operates the Large Animal Detection system. True, it acts only on large animals - such as a cow or elk. They move slowly and predictably, not like a kangaroo!

And in Canada, they went the other way. It was not cars that were equipped there, but the roads themselves. Along with danger warning signs, signal lights are placed that fire every time an elk or deer approaches a road. A danger signal is given by a network of radars programmed to detect large animals and track their movements.