AC3R: Automatically Reconstructing Car Crashes from Police Reports

Abstract

Autonomous driving carries the promise to drastically reduce car accidents, but recently reported fatal crashes involving self-driving cars suggest that the self-driving car software should be tested more thoroughly. For addressing this need, we introduce AC3R (Automatic Crash Constructor from Crash Report) which elaborates police reports to automatically recreate car crashes in a simulated environment that can be used for testing self-driving car software in critical situations. AC3R enables developers to quickly generate relevant test cases from the massive historical dataset of recorded car crashes. We demonstrate how AC3R can generate simulations of different car crashes and report the findings of a large user study which concluded that AC3R simulations are accurate. A video illustrating AC3R in action is available at: https://youtu.be/V708fDG_ux8