Don’t worry, driverless cars are learning from ‘Grand Theft Auto’
The blockbuster video game is one of the simulations researchers and engineers increasingly rely on to test and train the machines being primed to take control of the family sedan.
AI software has been playing around with games from “Super Mario Bros.” to “Angry Birds” for a while now, tackling problems in controlled environments and learning through trial and error.
Last year, scientists from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and Intel Labs developed a way to pull visual information from “Grand Theft Auto V.” Now some researchers are deriving algorithms from the game’s software that’s been tweaked for use in the burgeoning self-driving sector.
The latest in the franchise from publisher Rockstar Games Inc. is just about as good as reality, with 262 types of vehicles, more than 1,000 unpredictable pedestrians and animals, 14 weather conditions and countless bridges, traffic signals, tunnels and intersections.
[...] the game “is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from,” said Alain Kornhauser, a Princeton University professor of operations research and financial engineering who advises the Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team.
Waymo uses its simulators to create a confounding motoring situation for every variation engineers can think of: having three cars changing lanes at the same time at an assortment of speeds and directions, for instance.
Whenever a human has to grab the wheel of a test car because self-driving software hasn’t responded properly, “we’re able to play back the exact situation and predict via simulation what could have happened if the car had been left to drive itself,” Waymo said in a self-driving-project report.
For all the stupid mistakes that drivers regularly make, the human brain is far superior to a computer in perceiving and reacting to the unexpected, from a pothole to a construction zone to a toddler chasing a ball into the street.