Driverless technology continues to creep onto roads around the world, and while its impact on the insurance industry is well known, at the moment the technology faces a big problem.
Kangaroos.
That’s right – the hopping marsupial is a spanner in the works for the technology, according to Volvo, as sensors on vehicles struggle to recognise an Australian animal icon.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Swedish car manufacturer has been analysing how driverless cars interact with animals for more than a year and the hopping kangaroo remains a difficult prospect.
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"We've noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight ... when it's in the air it actually looks like it's further away, then it lands and it looks closer," David Picket, Volvo Australia's technical manager, told the ABC.
"If you look at a 'roo sitting at the side of a road, standing at the side of a road, in motion, all these shapes are actually different."
Volvo began researching kangaroo collisions in Australia in 2015 and is regarded as a global leader in critter crashes thanks to its famed moose test – which determines how a car would handle a moose suddenly crossing the road.
With autonomous or semi-autonomous cars hitting the roads around Australia, car manufacturers will need to find a way to improve their technology or the trillion-dollar disruption the technology could bring could all fall apart, thanks to Skippy and friends.
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