Autonomous Vehicles Filming

We have been visited by a film team of the Royal Society, the oldest national scientific institution of the world, to film our work on autonomous vehicles at the University of Leicester.

The filming consisted of four parts. We started with interviews of some of the involved scientists. Rayna, Mohammad, and me discussed the history and state of autonomous vehicles, we explained some aspects of artificial intelligence, and we gave some outlook on how this technology might change our lives.

After the interviews we set up a 3m x 5m track for our car to drive on autonomously. In addition to navigating the track, the car also had to stop for pedestrians entering the road (see also the video below).


On a larger and more complicated track we demonstrated partial autonomy of a car that is controlled by a human driver. We had set up a driver seat with steering wheel and pedals. A human driver would control the car based on a live video transmitted from the vehicle. We demonstrated an automatic braking system that prevents collisions even when the human driver is not paying attention.



Our final demonstrator was a system for generating test cases for autonomous vehicles. Instead of testing an AI we placed a human in the driver seat to demonstrate first-hand that our testing puts autonomous vehicles in challenging situations.



The filming took a bit more than 6h and we are looking forward to seeing the roughly 3,5min final cut advertising our work on Trusted Autonomous Vehicles for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in July.

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