"a team from France and Germany showed that their optical sleight of hand could easily dupe lidar-equipped autonomous cars into not recognizing obstacles on the road. Time after time, the experiments showed, the correct mirror placement left the cars oblivious and attempting to plow through sacrificial traffic cones. And if that was the disappearing act, they were also able to pull off a conjuring trick, deviously psyching out the car's software into seeing obstacles that weren't there."
"Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, uses rapid laser pulses to detect a car's surroundings, similar to how sonar uses sound waves. Most autonomous vehicle companies rely on them - except for Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk insists that the technology is an expensive " crutch." (It's worth noting, however, that his cameras only approach isn't without its major flaws, like being blinded by sunlight.)"
Mirror-adorned traffic cones can deceive lidar-equipped autonomous cars into not recognizing real obstacles and can generate phantom obstacles in vehicle perception. Correct mirror placement left vehicles oblivious and attempting to plow through cones, while other placements caused software to register obstacles that did not exist, risking abrupt emergency braking and failure to yield. Lidar detects surroundings with rapid laser pulses and is widely used by autonomous systems, though camera-only approaches have distinct vulnerabilities such as glare from sunlight. Inexpensive mirrors therefore represent practical, safety-critical threats to autonomous vehicle sensing and decision systems.
Read at Futurism
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