As an aside, kangaroos in motion are one of the most efficient and elegant mammals. I love watching them bounding away at speed effortlessly dodging scrub and trees - more like flight than running.
I grew up in Alaska and when you ran into a moose you weren't allowed to keep it. Instead there was a volunteer crew that was called to clean it up, compensated with the corpse (which is how I grew up on moose).
Of course, that is assuming you are still OK after hitting one - Kangaroos are BIG critters and can do considerable damage to the vehicle (and occupants) in a collision.
This was in an environment where daytime temperatures are often 40C (104F) plus during the day.
But Roo's need to be bled properly otherwise the meat goes to hell. You can get away with eating fresh tail, but really a roadkill roo wouldn't be very nice.
Plus, after 30 minutes in the sun, it'd be no good for anyone other than the flies.
The hopping movement makes it incredibly difficult to judge their speed and direction. They actually cover horizontal space at a far greater clip than they seem to, and also means they can make snap changes in their direction of travel VERY quickly, making any avoidance manoeuvre a bit of a wild guess.
Unpredictable motion is ideal for evading upright preditors with spears, but no so good for collision avoidance with fast moving metal objects.
Shouldn't the car stop for any obstacle, even ones it doesn't recognise? They surely can't expect to train it on every possible type of debris.
I wonder how it it handles low-flying birds.
In Sweden there are elks and deer but not so many kangaroos. :)
An intelligent system needs to learn. To learn it needs examples.
I think I know how to interpret that sentence...
An old favourite of mine, presumably apocryphal, involving kangaroos and the dangers of reusing code:
Who wouldn't be confused?
h/t Gary Matthews, elsewhere.
Imagine a 700kg (1,500 pound) moose with velvety brown fur suddenly wanting to cross the road at night in front of your car when you are traveling 120km/h (74mph).
That weight is all up high too on spindly legs. It's like running into a high table with 700kg of weigh on it.
Emus have the added bonus too of running directly at you when you sound the horn, instead of away as you'd expect. It's quite uncanny, and problematic at a hundred kilometres an hour.
On a more realistic level, stereoscopic vision seems like a pretty decent way to get distances.
Humans do pretty good with fuzzy notions of where the animal is. Exact distances aren't needed so much as reasonable estimates. If it is probably in the "need to brake zone" then the car brakes. Plus or minus a few meters isn't a big deal so long as you've got margins to work with. As animals are unpredictable, Volvo certainly has wide margins.
Most demo's only show human interaction.
Edit: and what about flying trash, leaves and so on? Thinking about it there are a lot of object types we interact with. Leaves for example mean nothing to us because they won't harm us. And we know crows will fly away. But pigeons on the other hand..
