Currently, it seems that pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists are more exposed and vulnerable to potential accidents on the road, so they need extra protection to eliminate every risk.
So, to address these issues, Waymo has recently published a new study that is focused on examining multiple types of crashes that involve some vulnerable road users. This study which is made by the Robotaxi company owned by Alphabet seems to be “the largest dataset of its kind in the US.”
It seems that about 40,000 people in the US are experiencing some fatal tragic events. It’s true that currently, automakers are very good at protecting the drivers and passengers inside of vehicles, but neglect in some ways the safety of the people on the road.
Even though the Academic Community didn’t show a high interest in studying the potential accidents and injuries of vulnerable road users or VRUs, the Waymo self-driving car company is focused on changing that. The Waymo, the autonomous cars company, has the goal to examine these types of potential incidents in order to make its autonomous car technology much safer.
According to John Sacnlon, the safety researcher from Waymo self-driving car company, the Waymo Los Angeles business needed footage from hundreds of car crashes. So they partnered with Nexar, the dash cam company in order to examine anonymized data of 5000 million miles of driving. In this partnership, the Waymo research team managed to reconstruct 335 crashes that involved VRUs in six USA cities.
It should be mentioned that almost 80% of the crashes examined happened in New York City, but none of the crashes studied were fatal.
Also, Waymo car company partnered with VUFO which is a traffic research group from Germany in order to develop models for injury risk review. But more than that, they managed to use anonymized data from the German In-Depth Accident Study to review many VRU crashes from over two decades.
According to the Waymo autonomous car researcher, it’s important to understand these types of incidents and collisions in order for AV operators to recreate some simulation and real-world testing to create safer technologies.
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