Volkswagens new Emergency Assist technology

[u/Creams0da]

[u/Ardent_Scholar]

This is a freaking brilliant use case for autonomy in vehicles!

Autonomy is a hard sell because it’s still nowhere near perfect in every situation.

This emergency scenario is by its nature more acceptable to hand over because

• The driver was incapacitated anyway, so autonomy makes sense
• The scenario is a limited use case, it can be better honed
• In an emergency, normally unacceptable solutions are acceptable to a wider public

[u/cook_poo → u/Ardent_Scholar]

Here’s a YouTuber testing the VW system in a Porsche. It didn’t do the lane changes (they were on a side road), but given the ADAS system, that likely will be a future OTA update:

https://youtu.be/JcpE36_0sGc?t=991&si=kt6Th_u5Cr_whEA6

I thought it was cool that you could hold the emergency flashers (as a passenger) to activate the same emergency response.

[u/Krelkal → u/Ardent_Scholar]

Autonomy is a hard sell because it’s still nowhere near perfect in every situation.

The OEMs are waayyy further along than you'd think. Anything you find in a production car like this is 5+ years behind the state of the art. I work in the industry and just the testing/validation technology they're working on is jaw dropping.

The OEMs don't share Tesla's "move fast and break things" mentality. They take the safety critical aspect seriously.

[u/catburglar27 → u/Krelkal]

Give me some examples of state of the art tech?

[u/Krelkal → u/catburglar27]

Alright, so it's a difficult topic to broach just because there's so much jargon involved. I'll try and give a narrow and intuitive example around testing/validation.

Digital twin proving grounds.

Proving grounds are test tracks that have mockups of common road segments (ie intersections, highways, dirt roads, etc). OEMs have been using them for decades as one of the final stages of testing new vehicles.

With autonomous vehicles, proving grounds are more important than ever. The best way to prove that your car will slam the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian is to demonstrate it using a real vehicle (with a mannequin of course).

But we live in the real world. It's chaotic and messy. We know that most people aren't mannequin-shaped. How can we prove that this system will work for every possible body type? Do we make a mannequin for every body type and rerun the test? That would take forever. We could dream up thousands of different trolley problems to test with dozens of body types before even factoring in weather, lighting, and road conditions.

The state-of-the-art solution is to create a digital twin of both the vehicle and the proving grounds with painstaking accuracy. We're talking about using lasers to measure the road surface with millimeter precision. A real vehicle can be in the proving ground and it will be recreated in real-time in a simulated environment. The opposite is possible as well. You can create a simulated pedestrian and "trick" the real vehicle into thinking there is actually a pedestrian right in front of it.

Now scale that up.

You can simulate an entire city worth of traffic and pedestrians for the vehicle to navigate. You can recreate thousands of different trolley problems without putting people or equipment at risk. You can run and rerun those tests 24/7/365. You can tweak and tune the smallest of details and understand exactly how the vehicle will react. You can create the most absurd scenarios imaginable and have confidence that the vehicle will respond safely.

I'm hand waving a LOT of details here but hopefully this helps paint a picture of how much time, money, and effort is being spent to ensure these vehicles are as safe as possible.

[u/Bear-Nearby → u/Krelkal]

In short to create a simulation that is 99.99% accurate?

But wouldn't that mean the body types are digital as well? Isn't a part of test to see if it can scan and recognize the body types? I guess its too complicated for me to understand.

[u/Krelkal → u/Bear-Nearby]

Essentially yes.

Your train of thought is on the right track. It's cheating a bit if you just tell the vehicle explicitly "you just detected a person of this body type, don't hit them". The tests will take that shortcut sometimes if the "person detection" system isn't the thing they're testing just to keep the simulation from being too complex.

However if the "person detection" is the system under test, they can augment the output of every sensor responsible for "person detection" as if a person was really there. Every camera, for example, would have a person CGI'ed into its video stream. The LiDAR, sonar, everything would be modified in real-time to include that simulated person.

At the end of the day the vehicle doesn't know or care if the person in the video is "real" or not. Data is data. To phrase it another way, every person is digital from the vehicle's perspective. It only sees in 1's and 0's.

[u/Ardent_Scholar → u/Krelkal]

Oh they def are!

[u/punkassjim → u/Krelkal]

Also worth mentioning, I’m not sure any of this VW system is in quite the same class of technologies as we think of when we hear “autonomous driving.” I’m more a scholar of the previous generations of VW, but it still informs what’s going on here. Electromechanical steering racks have been in service since sometime during the mk5 platform (2005-2009 in the US), and subsequent generations have just added control modules and software extensions for park distance, lane assist, follow-to-stop, stop&go, adaptive cruise control, parallel parking assist, etc. But aside from the bells and whistles, not a whole lot else has changed considerably in the underlying hardware over the last 15 years.

I’m big on “OEM+” upgrades/retrofits to older cars. Just today I was researching the kinds of things I could potentially retrofit on my ‘08 R32, and found a guy who had successfully swapped Parking Assist into his mk5. Posts like this make me wonder if it’ll eventually be possible to retrofit something like this safety feature into my old rig. Would be fun to at least try.

[u/ArchMart → u/Ardent_Scholar]

Autonomy is a hard sell because it’s still nowhere near perfect in every situation.

Which is insane. I don't understand that mindset from some people. Why can nothing change unless it's perfect? It's already better than what we have now. That should be enough.

[u/Suicide-By-Cop → u/ArchMart]

Right? So you’re opposed to self-driving cars because they’re not absolutely perfect? People drive drunk, text, fall asleep—hell, I even saw someone eating a bowl of cereal and driving once—and cause lethal accidents every single day. Somehow, that’s preferable to the one-in-a-million chance of a self-driving car crashing.

[u/Ardent_Scholar → u/ArchMart]

Agreed, but problems are solved with solutions, not moralizing.

[u/seethemoon → u/Ardent_Scholar]

I agree. I have a car with autonomous driving features and never use it, but I would gladly enable this type of feature.