Google’s autonomous cars are perfecting horn honking

In order to perfect self-driving cars, Google thought it necessary to make sure they knew how to honk the horn.

The company aims to make its cars a bit more polite when it comes to beeping the horn, as opposed to its human counterparts that can become quite animated when it comes to sounds on the road.

According to a recent report released by Google, which documents the activities of the previous month, the car’s self-driving software is designed to recognize when honking may help alert other drivers to our presence.

So, for example, if a driver begins swerving into the car’s lane or backs out of a blind driveway, this would be an instance that the vehicle should know how to honk.

“During testing, we taught our vehicles to distinguish between potentially tricky situations and false positives, i.e. the difference between a car facing the wrong way during a three-point turn, and one that’s about to drive down the wrong side of the road,” the team wrote in its report.

The engineers watched as the car would sound the horn (only on the inside) and then take note of which beeps were called for and which were not in order to refine the software.  Once the car became more accurate with its beeps, Google began broadcasting the horn to the world.

The engineers have even taught their vehicle that are different types of honks for different situations. For instance, if another vehicle is slowly reversing toward the driverless car, two shorter beeps may be appropriate just to alert the driver, but if a situation requires more urgency, the vehicle will use one loud sustained honk.

The overall goal is to teach the cars to honk like a patient, experienced driver, as well as teach the cars to predict how other drivers respond to a beep in different situations.

Story via Google.