Abstract: A vehicle control method to be executed by a controller for controlling a vehicle that travels in an area including a plurality of floors, wherein the controller is configured to: in a case where detecting occurrence of a disaster and determining that a floor on which the vehicle exists is different from a floor on which a first evacuation place being a priority evacuation place exists, set a destination to a second evacuation place existing on a floor that is a same as the floor on which the vehicle exists; and cause the vehicle to move to the second evacuation place.

Abstract: A vehicle control method according to an embodiment is a vehicle control method to be executed by a controller for controlling a vehicle that travels in an area, wherein the controller is configured to: in a case where detecting occurrence of a disaster and determining that nobody is riding on the vehicle, cause the vehicle to move to a refuge place, and the refuge place includes at least one of a place in which the vehicle having taken refuge hinders passage of an evacuee toward an outside of the evacuation route and a place in which the vehicle having taken refuge prevents an evacuee from entering a dangerous zone.

Abstract: An operation control unit and a driving control unit mutually monitor an operation state of each other, and when a first control unit detects an error of the other (second) control unit, the first control unit performs a driving control on driving sources, at a speed more limited than that in a normal mode based on an operation signal.

Abstract: A circuit startup method utilizing utterance estimation in a speech processing system including a sound collecting device is provided. The circuit startup method includes a subset power supply step of supplying power to the sound collecting device and a signal processing circuit, and a sound collecting step of inputting a sound from the sound collecting device through the signal processing circuit. The circuit startup method further includes an utterance estimation step of estimating whether or not a speech is contained in the inputted sound, and a power supply step of supplying power to the speech processing circuit for an utterance interval when it is estimated that a speech is contained from an estimation result of the utterance estimation step.