Self-driving cars have been around since 1993, and their object avoidance technologies still hasn’t been perfected. University of Tokyo researchers took a step in the right direction by adding robotic googly eyes onto their self-driving ‘Gazing Car’, which lets people know if the vehicle has spotted them.
For this particular study, the researchers added the robotic googly eyes to a golf buggy controlled by researchers. In the future, these eyes would be controlled using an AI-powered algorithm on a normal self-driving vehicle. What they found was that the eyes only really helped males in really dangerous situations, while it boosted the confidence of females by signaling it was safe to cross.
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The results suggested a clear difference between genders, which was very surprising and unexpected. While other factors like age and background might have also influenced the participants’ reactions, we believe this is an important point, as it shows that different road users may have different behaviors and needs, that require different communication ways in our future self-driving world,” said Chia-Ming Chang, researcher from the University of Tokyo in Japan.
