UK Initiative To Make Driverless Cars More Human While Removing Human Drivers

The concept of driverless cars has been on the mind of drivers, engineers, and legislators for some time now. In the UK, researchers are preparing for what will likely be a sizeable undertaking, which is supposedly intended to make driverless cars drive more like humans. That is to say, it’s meant to speed up the process of replacing humans with robot cars that react like humans on the road.

Called the “HumanDrive” project, the initiative is a collaborative effort that involves University of Leeds researchers in the UK as well as Nissan’s European Technical Centre. The goal of the project, which is set to last 30 months, is to make driverless vehicles that can react to unexpected situations the way humans ideally would.

On top of helping driverless vehicles integrate into society by basically reacting to things like accidents like competent human drivers would, the initiative could also help to establish trust among the public. Many people still view self-driving technology with a healthy dose of skepticism while industry experts and researchers already see it as the future.

In a press release, the principal investigator of the project, Natasha Merat explained that the whole point of the exercise is to produce driverless cars that drive much the same way competent humans do. If one such vehicle drives by, pedestrians or other drivers shouldn’t suspect anything.

“The project aim is for the HumanDrive car to travel in a way that would appear human to the outside world, navigating through all road types and driving conditions,” Merat said. “Our algorithm development is trying to achieve this along with an understanding of what people want from an automated driving experience.”

This is one aspect of developing self-driving technology that needs to be handled carefully if the trend is to catch on. Cars driving themselves isn’t exactly as easy to swallow as having powerful computers in people’s pockets; i.e. smartphones.