Autonomous Vehicles Need to Learn How to Deal with Aggressive Drivers

You’ve likely seen it on the highway — a car that’s tailgating, darting between lanes, passing in the shoulder. You, a (presumably) human person, understand what that means: An irritated driver is behind the wheel. As autonomous vehicle development continues, those cars will eventually need to learn how to respond to that same situation. But, how do you teach road rage to a robot? Researchers at the University of Warwick over in England are trying. A new study from the university tries to quantify road rage, and shape it into something that autonomous vehicles can understand — pure, empirical data. Our human understanding of road rage relies on something computers don’t have: Empathy. We can see a car swerve, jerk its way from lane to lane, and intuitively understand this as aggressive behavior — we know what angry humans look like, how they act. But computers lack empathy. They have no means of intuiting a person’s mood. They, instead, need hard facts to work from.

https://jalopnik.com/autonomous-vehicles-need-to-learn-about-road-rage-1850343865