Patterns can be used to disable self-driving cars, researchers show

A group of researchers, here wearing T-shirts with patterns that confuse self-driving cars, have shown that these coloured patterns can disrupt the autonomous driving systems. — Wolfram Scheible/Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems/dpa

Who knew self-driving cars were so easy to confuse? For all their high-tech safety, autonomous cars still struggle to make sense of the simplest of things: patterns.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Tuebingen, Germany have shown that certain coloured patterns can confuse a car's autopilot system, thus posing a serious danger to passengers.