The rhetorical heyday of autonomous vehicles has seemingly come and gone. The technology is still under development, with legacy manufacturers and commercial operators continuing to invest in self-driving development programs at a tempered rate. Even so, the proliferation of the technology is strong enough (and maybe strange enough, too) that the realm of academic research is still deeply invested. It is the future, after all, or at least that’s what we were told. But the idyllic future of self-driving cars may not be so safe and sound, either, according to researchers studying lidar hacking at the University of California Irvine.
From an article in Autoweek by Emmet White.
That’s because there is an insidious, potentially hazardous vulnerability baked into the technological recipe that makes autonomous vehicles possible.
To add redundancy to its navigation and sensing systems, many autonomous vehicle developers use lidar, known in the long form as Light Detection and Ranging.
Using pulsed lasers, lidar systems make a map of the environment ahead as the signals rebound and the distance between is calculated.
Developed by NASA in the 1990s, lidar is now par for the course on most autonomous programs including Waymo and Cruise, backing up the radar and camera-based monitoring systems.
However, because lidar relies on an accurately returning laser beam, computer scientists and electrical engineers at UC Irvine and Japan’s Keio University suspected and then tested the possibility of bad-faith laser spoofing.
And the results are certainly concerning, across the testing spectrum of nine commercially available lidar systems.
The team found deficiencies in aging and newer generation lidar systems, potentially leading to abrupt, unnecessary, and dangerous driving behavior from autonomous vehicles.
Depending on the parameters set by the developer, these attacks could lead to emergency stops or strong swerves away from a sensed object that doesn’t actually exist.
For the complete article on lidar hacking CLICK HERE.
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