Could this be the first smart car for quadriplegics?

In a time where the driverless automated car is becoming a modern reality, we are provided with great potential to make things previously improbable if not impossible suddenly possible.

My interest was piqued when I came across design plans for car that could be controlled by a driver with quadriplegia. At first the idea seemed mere fantasy but as I spoke to transport designer Rajshekhar Dass and learnt move about the control of technical devices through brain waves, facial gestures and infinitesimal movements the idea seemed more of conceivable.

Rajshekar Dass is a car designer from Mumbai, India currently based in Turkey. He has an impressive design history which includes fronting a winner team of the 2016 Michelin Challenge Design for the Google Community Vehicle and  Winner of the  Vehicle, Mobility and Transport Design 2014-15 A’Design Award for a Micro Taxi among awards. He’s interned for Volkswagen in Germany and worked in a range of car dealerships, so has seen car technology from a range of angles.

He detailed his rationale for a car designed specifically for people with quadraplegia, a cohort of people who until now have only featured in the automated cars of the future as mere passengers. Such a design is the first of its kind:

“Audric Design basically was designed with a particular person in mind, Sam Schmidt, former Indy Racing League driver. He was made paraplegic due to a racing car accident in 2000.  He wanted to get back on the track but came back as an owner rather than driver. Everyone loves driving so my interest was how can we use today’s technology to solve these problems for an audience that are generally overlooked? How can today’s tech be used to enable the same driving experience that he enjoyed previously?”

It’s always interesting to learn how a designer approaches the design experience, Dass revealed:

“the first point of research is the capabilities of the human body when functionality has been impaired. In paraplegia the brain signals do not reach the human organs  bellow the neck, so the brain signals are basically lost. I thought, what if you could use today’s technology to enable the signals to be transferred to the computers onboard of a car instead, so you can give a rebirth to the whole driving experience?”

Dass explained that emerging technology like movement through brain wave signals,  gesture and facial recognition and sensor technology s along with  augmented reality made his design more than a well intentioned concept.

There’s precedence here. For example, in 2010  Emotiv released the Emotiv Epoch+, a commercial wearable device designed to enable users to play computer games on a screen through functioning as a brain-computer interface device (Admittedly the design was not without it’s challenges as this review attests).

Then in 2014, Ian Burkhart became the first paralyzed person to use neural bypass technology to pick up and hold a spoon using his own brainpower, with his abilities increasing overtime.

How could it work?

Dass stresses that the car would be completely autonomous in the first instance. But over time, the driver’s gestures and motions would be recorded by the car; for example, as the car is taking a right turn, the driver might be tilting his head. In this way, the car is learning from the driver instead of the driver learning from the car.

Dass explains further:

“There would be a series of levels which would be detected by the AI in the car, that slowly give the control to the driver. e.g. starting with audio and air-conditioning controls first. The next level could be controlling a little bit of the motion and slowly you’d graduate levels as you would in a game with the help of gesture recognition, eye movements and brain mapping. Once the car is confident as to the skill of the driver the complete controls would be available to the driver. but at the same time the car would still have the control over all the systems, as a built-in safety feature.

I’m aware that many people with paralysis experience involuntary movement such as spasms and jerking. I wondered if a car could be smart enough to distinguish these movements from voluntary actions.

Dass agreed:

It’s a good point. The car is completely autonomous and the AI is constantly monitoring the driver’s motions to learn his/her actions, and since the AI is specially developed for paralyzed drivers it can recognize such involuntary movements. Since the AI is also scanning the brain and can understand that the motion has no connection with the brain signals it can be tagged as involuntary action and not require a reaction”.

As well as its driving capabilities, the car would also be designed specifically with the needs of the driver in mind with a rear entry door suited to a wheelchair which would be specially designed to become the driving seat in the vehicle. Dass explained that the project has only been recently published online and he is keen to explore his ideas further with people with disabilities and associated organizations to enable further development.

In an era where ideas as seemingly bizarre as Google’s patent for“sticky” technology to protect pedestrians if they get struck by Google’s self-driving cars, a mind powered car doesn’t seem all that strange at all.

Dass is working on a range of diverse projects currently and judging by the ingenuity inherent in his design portfolio, this is simply an example of things to come.

Could this be the first smart car for quadriplegics?

In a time where the driverless automated car is becoming a modern reality, we are provided with great potential to make things previously improbable if not impossible suddenly possible.

My interest was piqued when I came across design plans for car that could be controlled by a driver with quadriplegia. At first the idea seemed mere fantasy but as I spoke to transport designer Rajshekhar Dass and learnt move about the control of technical devices through brain waves, facial gestures and infinitesimal movements the idea seemed more of conceivable.

Rajshekar Dass is a car designer from Mumbai, India currently based in Turkey. He has an impressive design history which includes fronting a winner team of the 2016 Michelin Challenge Design for the Google Community Vehicle and  Winner of the  Vehicle, Mobility and Transport Design 2014-15 A’Design Award for a Micro Taxi among awards. He’s interned for Volkswagen in Germany and worked in a range of car dealerships, so has seen car technology from a range of angles.

He detailed his rationale for a car designed specifically for people with quadraplegia, a cohort of people who until now have only featured in the automated cars of the future as mere passengers. Such a design is the first of its kind:

“Audric Design basically was designed with a particular person in mind, Sam Schmidt, former Indy Racing League driver. He was made paraplegic due to a racing car accident in 2000.  He wanted to get back on the track but came back as an owner rather than driver. Everyone loves driving so my interest was how can we use today’s technology to solve these problems for an audience that are generally overlooked? How can today’s tech be used to enable the same driving experience that he enjoyed previously?”

It’s always interesting to learn how a designer approaches the design experience, Dass revealed:

“the first point of research is the capabilities of the human body when functionality has been impaired. In paraplegia the brain signals do not reach the human organs  bellow the neck, so the brain signals are basically lost. I thought, what if you could use today’s technology to enable the signals to be transferred to the computers onboard of a car instead, so you can give a rebirth to the whole driving experience?”

Dass explained that emerging technology like movement through brain wave signals,  gesture and facial recognition and sensor technology s along with  augmented reality made his design more than a well intentioned concept.

There’s precedence here. For example, in 2010  Emotiv released the Emotiv Epoch+, a commercial wearable device designed to enable users to play computer games on a screen through functioning as a brain-computer interface device (Admittedly the design was not without it’s challenges as this review attests).

Then in 2014, Ian Burkhart became the first paralyzed person to use neural bypass technology to pick up and hold a spoon using his own brainpower, with his abilities increasing overtime.

How could it work?

Dass stresses that the car would be completely autonomous in the first instance. But over time, the driver’s gestures and motions would be recorded by the car; for example, as the car is taking a right turn, the driver might be tilting his head. In this way, the car is learning from the driver instead of the driver learning from the car.

Dass explains further:

“There would be a series of levels which would be detected by the AI in the car, that slowly give the control to the driver. e.g. starting with audio and air-conditioning controls first. The next level could be controlling a little bit of the motion and slowly you’d graduate levels as you would in a game with the help of gesture recognition, eye movements and brain mapping. Once the car is confident as to the skill of the driver the complete controls would be available to the driver. but at the same time the car would still have the control over all the systems, as a built-in safety feature.

I’m aware that many people with paralysis experience involuntary movement such as spasms and jerking. I wondered if a car could be smart enough to distinguish these movements from voluntary actions.

Dass agreed:

It’s a good point. The car is completely autonomous and the AI is constantly monitoring the driver’s motions to learn his/her actions, and since the AI is specially developed for paralyzed drivers it can recognize such involuntary movements. Since the AI is also scanning the brain and can understand that the motion has no connection with the brain signals it can be tagged as involuntary action and not require a reaction”.

As well as its driving capabilities, the car would also be designed specifically with the needs of the driver in mind with a rear entry door suited to a wheelchair which would be specially designed to become the driving seat in the vehicle. Dass explained that the project has only been recently published online and he is keen to explore his ideas further with people with disabilities and associated organizations to enable further development.

In an era where ideas as seemingly bizarre as Google’s patent for“sticky” technology to protect pedestrians if they get struck by Google’s self-driving cars, a mind powered car doesn’t seem all that strange at all.

Dass is working on a range of diverse projects currently and judging by the ingenuity inherent in his design portfolio, this is simply an example of things to come.

What the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash means for driverless cars

The fact that a driver was killed in a crash inside his Tesla on Wednesday while the semi-autonomous Autopilot system was engaged is tragic. However, the collision will have ripple effects across Tesla and the rest of the automotive industry.

That's because it brings into question people's trust in self-driving systems. While it's fair for people to feel wary of Tesla Autopilot and other semi-autonomous driving systems, it's important people don't conflate it with truly autonomous cars, or use the incident to write off self-driving vehicles altogether. 

Tesla's blog post explaining the crash that took the life of one of its drivers while its Autopilot system was engaged is impressively detailed. From the description, we learn it was essentially a perfect storm of circumstances.

According to Tesla, the Model S was traveling on a divided highway when a tractor trailer crossed in front of the car. The side of the truck apparently lined up perfectly with the skyline in both position and color, and because of that neither Autopilot nor the driver saw it. Autopilot missed it because the car was lined up with the middle of the truck, where there are no wheels, and the Tesla's low-mounted sensors only look downward toward the road, not above it. That allowed the car to drive underneath the trailer, killing the driver.

Many are saying, "Clearly, this driver wasn't watching the road, like he was supposed to. How can he miss that truck?" However, we weren't there. Maybe any one of us, too, would have not seen the truck — as unlikely as that sounds. That said, it's possible (perhaps even probable) he was distracted.

Turns out, though, whether or not the driver was distracted is only one factor to take into account when put in the context of autonomous driving. Obviously, carmakers need to get the tech right before putting it in the hands of drivers. And even when they do, there's a larger question of whether that tech — specifically semi-autonomous systems — might lull drivers into a false sense of security.

Beta testing with cars

Tesla clearly states that Autopilot is in beta. Anyone with an iPhone or PC probably isn't bothered by that — public betas happen all the time. Apple's Siri is a great example of a beta project that was put in the hands of customers.

That's essentially what's going on here with Autopilot. It's in beta, meaning it's not finished. That's why Tesla warns drivers that they still need to pay attention while Autopilot is engaged. But it's becoming fairly clear that the better your semi-autonomous system is, the more drivers are tempted to "check out" from the experience.

This is troubling because Tesla is the only automaker beta testing its driving systems on customers. Every other established brand does its testing with its employees and engineers. All of the comparable systems on the road today from other leading carmakers was developed and tested in labs and controlled environments years ago.

BMW's CEO Harald Krüger said late last year that applying the app industry approach to beta testing is "absolutely impossible with safety features in a car.” Adding, "our technology must be 100 percent reliable."

In the world of autonomous driving, there are levels, measured from 0 to 5. Zero autonomy is traditional driving. Level 1 is autonomous braking — where the car can independently hit the brakes to prevent an imminent collision — and it's slowly being added to most new cars. Level 2 is automatic cruise control and some automated steering. Level 3 is complete autonomous driving in certain situations, like on the freeway. Level 4 is full autonomy, driving from your garage to your destination without you touching a steering wheel or a pedal. Above that, there's a Level 5, where the human can’t even intervene (think Google's steering wheel-less cars).

Tesla's Autopilot is considered Level 2. It uses cameras and radar to see lanes and cars and can steer the car through most everyday freeway scenarios. Some other manufacturers, like Mercedes and Volvo, have deployed Level 2 systems as well.

The difference between Level 2 and Level 4 is immense. Full autonomy requires more than the forward-facing sensors like those on the Tesla Model S; it incorporates 360-degree computer vision across many parts of the spectrum, enabled by cameras and LIDAR (laser-based radar), as well as car-to-car communication. Autopilot does not have most of this tech.

What's more, these systems and more — including the car's battery, for example — need to have backups, should one of them fail the car can still handle itself. Only with all these things onboard should a driver be allowed to really disengage from driving, because the whole idea is, no matter what happens, the car can handle it. That's why Volvo has said it will accept liability for its cars when they are in fully autonomous mode; a carmaker wouldn't make that claim if it wasn't fully confident in its car's capabilities.

Despite being a Level 2, many drivers treat Tesla's Autopilot as a Level 3 or 4. As I've experienced first-hand, and what we've seen from Tesla drivers, people feel like Autopilot is so in control that they disengage — they look away, start texting or even take a nap. Behind the wheel of an Autopilot-fitted Tesla, you feel like you can pretty much check out. That is, if you don't know any better.

Tesla did say in its blog post that Autopilot "makes frequent checks to ensure that the driver's hands remain on the wheel and provides visual and audible alerts if hands-on is not detected." I never experienced this when I tested the system, but that was prior to an update to Autopilot that Tesla pushed out in February. It's unclear whether these alerts didn't happen, the driver ignored them, or simply tapped the wheel now and then without looking up. Or, again, maybe he was paying attention — we just don't know yet.

Other semi-autonomous systems from Volvo, Honda and Mercedes are as technically advanced as Autopilot. But for safety reasons, they don't allow you to remove your hands from the wheel for long periods of time. Those other automakers have also purposely limited the car's ability to correct itself, instead relying on the driver to do things like keep the car from drifting into another lane. That's partly why those systems aren't considered beta, like Tesla's is.

In fact, the Mercedes-Benz E-Class's Drive Pilot system is so good, it earned the first autonomous driving license ever given to a production car in Nevada. But Mercedes didn't put that advanced system into its production car. Instead, it retarded it significantly so that drivers weren't just told but knew they were ultimately in charge of the driving, not the car.

Setback for driverless cars?

Let's not forget that this crash was human tragedy. The driver was a Tesla enthusiast with a family, and whatever the fallout is in the car industry, it's terrible this happened at all. But there's also a real fear that the incident will derail self-driving tech. A Jaguar engineer not too long ago told me he worried an incident with Autopilot could set back autonomous driving by a decade.

Ultimately, though, the crash isn't a condemnation of automated driving, which has real potential to save lives. Going by average statistics, 87 people died on the road in America yesterday, and 90% of those were due to human error. Using one death to suggest that semi-autonomous tech isn't safe is misinformed at best. The endgame of autonomy is zero road fatalities.

But it's a fair question whether a sufficiently powerful semi-autonomous system — like Autopilot — instills too much false confidence in the car's ability to drive itself, leading to drivers disengaging more than they should. During testing of its self-driving cars, Google found that its drivers — who were paid to pay attention to the road — would disengage since they essentially thought, "The car's got it." If disengagement is the norm for Level 2 systems (as I suspect it is for many drivers) this tragic crash could be just the first.

The NHTSA is investigating the fatal wreck and Autopilot's role. When it's done, the government may be forced to write more laws that pertain to self-driving systems. That could mean the end of questionable practice of beta testing semi-autonomous driving systems, and a wider acknowledgement that those systems have to do everything possible to ensure drivers keep their eyes on the road. 

Australia could see driverless cars on the road within five years

SYDNEY, Australia — South Australia may have gotten a head start with trials in 2015, but New South Wales (NSW) is also committing to a driverless car future. 

Automated cars without drivers could be on NSW roads within five years, the state's minister for transport, Andrew Constance, predicted at a summit on the future of transport in Sydney Monday. "We're going to have driverless cars on our streets, in our suburbs," he told reporters