Carnegie Mellon University

Headshot of Raj Rajkumar with HH

June 14, 2019

Rajkumar points out the limitations of Tesla’s Autopilot technology

Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assist system, has been shown to be problematic since two people have died from vehicle collisions while using it. Autopilot is a kind of adaptive cruise control system that relies mostly on the radar to avoid hitting other vehicles. Radar outputs of detected objects are sometimes ignored by the vehicle’s software to deal with the generation of “false positives,” said ECE’s Raj Rajkumar. Without these, the radar would “see” an overpass and report that as an obstacle, causing the vehicle to slam on the brakes. Rajkumar added that “Tesla is not handling the well-known limitations of AI,” referring to the classic problem that machines do not know how to handle new situations. Read more here.