Part 1. Human vs AV
In the last post, I told about what causes fatal accidents in self-driving cars. In short, cognitive differences and communication failure between humans and machine drivers cause accidents. Today, I would like to talk about the situation and details of the two entities.

1. Cognitive Differences

First, the process of mechanical and human drivers making decisions in the car is not so different. The control loop, called OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act), shows a cyclical process of control machine which was first devised by the United States Air Force.

OODA, devised by a U.S. Air Force colonel

When you imagine the human driver driving the car following the loop, the driver sees the surrounding environment with his eyes, applies and judges the situation with the vision data, and drives the car with his hands and feet. The human is in the car and has done everything himself. In other words, he is in the loop.

However, with the increasing technology in driving autonomation systems, humans are becoming supervisors above the control loop (on-the-loop), and machines control a vehicle in the loop instead of humans. Also, the control loop of the machine has more branches than humans, as shown in the table below.

VEHICLE SYSTEM DYNAMICS 2020, VOL. 58, NO. 5, 672–704

Look around with multiple sensors. Localize themselves in the situation with a computer and cloud networking in the vehicle. Based on data from all sensors and the cloud, judge the next action. Operating the vehicle.

Vision is the first step in the control loop and is currently the most controversial stage in AV.

Self-driving cars use three major sensors to obtain the same visual information as humans. Camera, Radar, and LiDAR. (Exceptionally, Tesla was chosen to remove LiDAR and measure depth and distance only with the camera and Radar.) In addition, a machine driver receives traffic information, such as signal systems and construction roads, thanks to GPS and HD maps.

The reason why the three sensors are combined is that each sensor has different characteristics, such as range of vision and resolution, as shown in the table below.
['Solji Lee']
['Design Theses', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Interface Design', 'UX Design', 'Car Design']