Designing the autonomous vehicle of the future requires an array of the best technical talent available: automobile and software engineers, experts on sensor technology and artificial intelligence, computer scientists, production specialists and many others.
But one profession you might not expect to find at the design table — anthropologist — is playing a key role in developing Nissan’s next generation autonomous vehicle, analyzing human driving interactions to ensure that it is prepared to be a “good citizen” on the road.
“Car technology is continuing to evolve and change,” said Melissa Cefkin, principal scientist and design anthropologist at the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley. “And now … we’re adding this autonomous dimension to it … that will bring around further changes in society, all the way down to the everyday way in which we interact and behave on the road.”
In the case of autonomous vehicles, Cefkin said that means taking a fresh look at how humans interact with “a deeply and profoundly cultural object” — the automobile — and gaining insights into how new technologies might interpret or act on those behaviors.”
When Cefkin joined Nissan in March 2015, after stints at IBM, Sapient Corp. and Silicon Valley’s influential Institute for Research on Learning, she and her team immediately began documenting not just interactions in the city involving drivers, but also those between vehicles and pedestrians, bicyclists and road features.
“We’re trying to distill out of our work … some key lessons for what an autonomous vehicle will need to know — what it perceives in the world and then how it can make sense, make judgments and behave itself to be able to interact effectively in those different systems,” she said.
Cefkin said that some features depicted in the video may end up closely resembling those of Nissan’s autonomous vehicles in the next decade — like a light that “acknowledges” the presence of a pedestrian. The team is also exploring how to communicate the car’s intention in situations where “multiple agents” — say numerous pedestrians or bicyclists — are present. The key would be how to communicate what the vehicle is doing, “like stopping, waiting, yielding, about to go, going, things like that,” in a way that would be interpreted in the same way by everyone.
Cefkin said such studies demonstrate the wisdom of having anthropologists involved in the earliest stages of vehicle design, rather than making adjustments later in the product cycle as some other automakers have done.
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