Today, I was challenged with the question of how well robocars would deal with deer crossing the road. There are 1.5 million collisions with deer in the USA every year, resulting in 200 deaths of people and of course many more deer. Many of the human injuries and crashes have come from trying to swerve to avoid the deer, and skidding instead during the panic.

At present there is no general purpose computer vision system that can just arbitrarily identify things -- which is to say you can't show it a camera view of anything and ask, "what is that?" CV is much better at looking for specific things, and a CV system that can determine if something is a deer is probably something we're close to being able to make. However, I made a list of a number of the techniques that robots might have to do a better job of avoiding collisions with animals, and started investigating thoughts on one more, the "flying bumper" which I will detail below.

Spotting and avoiding the deer

• There are great techniques for spotting animal eyes using infrared light bouncing off the retinas. If you've seen a cheap flash photo with the "red eye" effect you know about this. An IR camera with a flash of IR light turns out to be great at spotting eyes and figuring out if they are looking at you, especially in darkness.
• A large number of deer collisions do take place at dusk or at night, both because deer move at these times and humans see badly during them. LIDAR works superbly in darkness, and can see 100m or more. On dry pavement, a car can come to a full stop from 80mph in 100m, if it reacts instantly. The robocar won't identify a deer on the road instantly but it will do so quickly, and can thus brake to be quite slow by the time it travels 100m.
• Google's full-map technique means the robocar will already have a complete LIDAR map of the road and terrain -- every fencepost, every bush, every tree -- and of course, the road. If there's something big in the LIDAR scan at the side of the road that was not there before, the robocar will know it. If it's moving and more detailed analysis with a zoom camera is done, the mystery object at the side of the road can be identified quickly. (Radar will also be able to tell if it's a parked or disabled vehicle.)
• They are expensive today, but in time deep infrared cameras which show temperature will become cheap and appear in robocars. Useful for spotting pedestrians and tailpipes, they will also do a superb job on animals, even animals hiding behind bushes, particularly in the dark and cool times of deer mating season.
• Having spotted the deer, the robocar will never panic, the way humans often do.
• The robocar will know its physics well, and unlike the human, can probably plot a safe course around the deer that has no risk of skidding. If the ground is slick with leaves or rain, it will already have been going more slowly. The robocar can have a perfect understanding of the timings involved with swerving into the oncoming traffic lane if it is clear. The car can calculate the right speed (possibly even speeding up) where there will be room to safely swerve.
• If the oncoming traffic lane is not clear, but the oncoming car is also a robocar, it might some day in the far future talk to that car both to warn it and to make sure both cars have safe room to swerve into the oncoming lane.
• Areas with major deer problems put up laser sensors along the sides of the road, which detect if an animal crosses the beam and flash lights. A robocar could get data from such sensors to get more advanced warning of animal risks areas.

Getting the deer to move

There might be some options to get the deer to get out of the way. Deer sometimes freeze; a "deer in the headlights." A robocar, however, does not need to have visible headlights! It may have them on for the comfort of the passengers who want to see where they are going and would find it spooky driving in the dark guided by invisible laser light, but those comfort lights can be turned off or dimmed during the deer encounter, something a human driver can't do. This might help the deer to move.

For many years I have had a popular article on what lenses to buy for a Canon DSLR. I shoot with Canon, but much of the advice is universal, so I am translating the article into Nikon.

If you shoot Nikon and are familiar with a variety of lenses for them, I would appreciate your comments. At the start of the article I indicate the main questions I would like people's opinions on, such as moderately priced wide angle lenses, as well as regular zooms.

There's a problem I have seen at a number of free events, particularly "unconference" events which have a limited capacity. There will be a sign-up list, and once it fills up, people are turned away or get on a waiting list. (Some online ticket services now support the idea of free tickets for this purpose.)

There's news about the world's two small PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) projects, which are both fairly robocar like, in that they involve self-steered rubber tired vehicles.