Rowe featured in NPR for research on bicycle safety and autonomous vehicles
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2015, nearly 1,000 cyclists were killed in car crashes. Some people say that self-driving vehicles will make our roadways safer, but before this can happen, researchers argue that these vehicles must be able to recognize bicyclists. In an article for NPR, ECE’s Anthony Rowe says that cars need help detecting cyclists because cyclists tend to act more unpredictably than traditional vehicles. “Cars have a very regular pattern with the way they move, whereas when people are riding bicycles they change between either acting like cars on the side of the road,” says Rowe. “They tend to move in a slightly more erratic way. It's much harder to predict.” Recently, Rowe and his team have been trying to make it possible for bikes to feed information to cars, which would ultimately help self-driving cars move more cautiously around cyclists and pedestrians.