Cognitive computing company VERSES AI has revealed the first results of research between VERSES and Volvo Cars, using VERSES algorithms to predict the appearance of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars that are obscured behind stationary vehicles and objects. A paper co-authored by research teams at both Volvo Cars and VERSES has been published this month.

The paper, titled “Navigation under uncertainty: trajectory prediction and occlusion reasoning with switching dynamical systems, explores a way to predict the trajectory of movement for people, animals, and objects occurring behind stationary objects like parked cars to help vehicles and drivers avoid them if the people enter the street unexpectedly.

The research presents completed experiments illustrating capabilities using the Waymo open dataset. The results demonstrate significant improvements in predicting animals, people, and objects entering the street; something that vehicles with current AI have not been able to do.

“As the automotive industry progresses towards fully autonomous self-driving cars, predicting where unseen obstacles like people or bicyclists may be or which trajectory they may be on has been a significant unsolved safety challenge. We believe the inability of current autonomous driving systems to overcome this hurdle is holding back the AV industry worldwide. Volvo Cars is globally recognised for its unwavering commitment to vehicle safety. So, they were the perfect partner to work with to showcase how VERSES can help solve this problem,” said Gabriel René, CEO of VERSES. “We believe this research project with Volvo Cars; part of our Genius Beta project, demonstrates a major advancement in autonomous vehicle safety capability. We expect the research project to pave the way for safer streets for pedestrians, cyclists, cars, robots, and beyond.”