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Volvo’s self-driving cars are thrown off by kangaroos

Volvo, like seemingly every other company, has been working on its autonomous vehicle technology and has run into an interesting problem. While testing its cars in Australia, the company found that kangaroos were both a nuisance and very confusing to its cars.

The vehicles' detection system has been exposed to large animals before – it came across moose while being tested in Sweden and it can respond to deer, elk and caribou. But kangaroos move much differently than other animals and their hopping is throwing off the system. "When it's in the air it actually looks like it's further away, then it lands and it looks closer," Volvo Australia's technical manager David Pickett told the ABC. . . .