44,897 research outputs found

    Ethics, Safety, and Autonomous Vehicles

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    This roundtable explores the ethical and safety implications of the rapidly evolving technology of autonomous vehicles

    The Pedestrian Safety Problem and the Ethical Implications in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles

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    This thesis analyzes the important topic of pedestrian safety in a world of conventional vehicles, as well as the future changes brought about by autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles. Pedestrian safety has continued to decline with increased pedestrian fatalities since 2009, as people walk more and are more distracted by handheld devices. Further complications in solving the problem with pedestrian fatalities are exacerbated by the ethical concerns that come into play when programming a robot to make decisions that a human would have been responsible for in the past. A literature review was conducted on pedestrian safety, ethics, and autonomous vehicles. To explore the ethical decision making of current drivers and road-users, specifically members of Generation Z, a group of Clemson students was surveyed and interviewed. The majority of the participants stated that they make their decisions based on situational factors and that ethics is not black and white. This is despite most of the respondents also being raised in religious households. However, the value of human life was upheld by 97% of the respondents. Despite the consistency in opinion on the importance of protecting human life, the respondents disagreed about which human life should be protected, the pedestrian or the passenger in an autonomous vehicle. This variation in opinions must be addressed as moral relativism collides with huge technological shifts. However, this study concludes with an optimistic outlook that we can address these issues through collaboration between the private and public sectors and private competition to create the safest and most ethical vehicles possible

    Teaching Autonomous Systems at 1/10th-scale

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    Teaching autonomous systems is challenging because it is a rapidly advancing cross-disciplinary field that requires theory to be continually validated on physical platforms. For an autonomous vehicle (AV) to operate correctly, it needs to satisfy safety and performance properties that depend on the operational context and interaction with environmental agents, which can be difficult to anticipate and capture. This paper describes a senior undergraduate level course on the design, programming and racing of 1/10th-scale autonomous race cars. We explore AV safety and performance concepts at the limits of perception, planning, and control, in a highly interactive and competitive environment. The course includes an ethics-centered design philosophy, which seeks to engage the students in an analysis of ethical and socio-economic implications of autonomous systems. Our hypothesis is that 1/10th-scale autonomous vehicles sufficiently capture the scaled dynamics, sensing modalities, decision making and risks of real autonomous vehicles, but are a safe and accessible platform to teach the foundations of autonomous systems. We describe the design, deployment and feedback from two offerings of this class for college seniors and graduate students, open-source community development across 36 universities, international racing competitions, student skill enhancement and employability, and recommendations for tailoring it to various settings

    Ethical and Social Aspects of Self-Driving Cars

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    As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering, computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved. On the other hand, social and ethical problems are typically being presented in the form of an idealized unsolvable decision-making problem, the so-called trolley problem, which is grossly misleading. We argue that an applied engineering ethical approach for the development of new technology is what is needed; the approach should be applied, meaning that it should focus on the analysis of complex real-world engineering problems. Software plays a crucial role for the control of self-driving cars; therefore, software engineering solutions should seriously handle ethical and social considerations. In this paper we take a closer look at the regulative instruments, standards, design, and implementations of components, systems, and services and we present practical social and ethical challenges that have to be met, as well as novel expectations for software engineering.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

    Governing autonomous vehicles: emerging responses for safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks

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    The benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely acknowledged, but there are concerns about the extent of these benefits and AV risks and unintended consequences. In this article, we first examine AVs and different categories of the technological risks associated with them. We then explore strategies that can be adopted to address these risks, and explore emerging responses by governments for addressing AV risks. Our analyses reveal that, thus far, governments have in most instances avoided stringent measures in order to promote AV developments and the majority of responses are non-binding and focus on creating councils or working groups to better explore AV implications. The US has been active in introducing legislations to address issues related to privacy and cybersecurity. The UK and Germany, in particular, have enacted laws to address liability issues, other countries mostly acknowledge these issues, but have yet to implement specific strategies. To address privacy and cybersecurity risks strategies ranging from introduction or amendment of non-AV specific legislation to creating working groups have been adopted. Much less attention has been paid to issues such as environmental and employment risks, although a few governments have begun programmes to retrain workers who might be negatively affected.Comment: Transport Reviews, 201
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