Ford wants to patent self-defense for autonomous cars

The car could use 360-degree cameras to monitor what was going on around it, Ford suggests. That data could be fed into a neural network, specially trained to identify possibly aggressive or threatening behavior. That might be somebody wearing a mask or holding a weapon like a knife or a gun, or a dog baring its teeth.
Combined with tracking whether the potential threat is moving closer to the car or simply near it, Ford would be able to either act on the danger or simply monitor it. The countermeasures it envisages aren’t exactly James Bond-style hidden weapons or electrified door handles, mind. Instead, think along the lines of a more aggressive alarm system.
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