DRIVERLESS cars could be duped into interpreting a red traffic light as green, leaving them vulnerable to attacker-instigated crashes.
Although fully driverless cars aren’t yet on the roads, there are already concerns that they may be more vulnerable to vandalism.
To learn more, Chen Yan at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues tested if the cameras of different driverless models could be tricked into misinterpreting a traffic light.
The team aimed a laser at the sensors of five camera models used by such cars, with two open-source software packages interpreting the camera-captured images.
A laser with a wavelength of 650 nanometres introduced colour errors so that the entire image turned red, while a 520-nanometre wavelength gave the image a green hue. But neither fooled the cameras.
When flickering the laser at high frequencies, however,…
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New Scientist (Digital) - 1 Issue, 23-Apr-22