Teaching a self-driving car the emergency stop is harder than it seems

Much self-driving-car research focuses on pedestrian safety, but it is important to consider passenger safety and comfort, too. When braking to avoid a collision, for example, a vehicle should ideally ease, not slam, into a stop. In machine-learning parlance, this idea constitutes a multi-objective problem. Objective one: spare the pedestrian. Researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto took on this challenge with deep reinforcement learning.