Are We There Yet? Autonomous System Safety and Sensor Accuracy vs. ADAS Complexity

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Are We There Yet? Autonomous System Safety and Sensor Accuracy vs. ADAS Complexity

http://www.automotive-iq.com/chassis-systems/articles/are-we-there-yet-autonomous-system-safety-and-sensor-accuracy-vs-adas

Contributor: Graham Heeps | Posted: 10/10/2016

The fatal accident involving Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot technology has heightened public awareness of the safety implications of handing vehicle control to sensors and software. What are specialist suppliers doing to ensure that, as greater numbers of sensors and additional processing complexity is built into vehicles, the risk of accidents is decreased, not increased?

A robust system begins with robust sensors, according to Louay Eldada, the CEO of LiDAR supplier Quanergy, whose S3 product will go into production with Sensata at the end of 2016, ahead of potential vehicle launches a couple of years down the road. He identifies the need for physical robustness in the sensor – in the case of Quanergy, a solid-state LiDAR scanner that’s good for more than 100,000 hours of operation – as well as robustness in the information it supplies. Like others, he’s convinced that the addition of LiDAR to the sensor mix will deliver the accuracy needed for greater levels of vehicle autonomy.

“When you generate an object list that’s refreshed maybe 30 or 50 times per second, every one of those objects has to be correct,” he says. “You cannot have false positives or false negatives, which are equally bad.”

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“The idea of dual or triple redundancy using independent sensing technologies for automated driving, or at least two in the long term for the most robust automated emergency braking (AEB) system, will give us the opportunity to eliminate as many false positives as possible,” adds Andy Whydell, director of product planning for Global Electronics at ZF TRW. “In the case of a two-sensor system for AEB, we can tailor our algorithms based on parameters such as vehicle speed and the detected object. I might choose to be more aggressive if my camera detects a pedestrian stepping out in front of me at low speed, for example. Even with only one input, I might start a response, maybe a brake pre-fill or a first-level braking, while I wait for a second sensor to confirm, because any speed reduction will give a direct benefit if a pedestrian is really there.”

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1. So will we ever see the day when cars can boast 100% sensor certainty?

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Quanergy’s Eldada says that 100% certainty is unrealistic – but nor does it matter. “Nothing in life is 100%,” he reasons. “The question becomes, how many 9s do you have? Right now, video and radar-based systems do not even have a 90% rate of [detection] accuracy. With LiDAR, we assess that today we are at 99.99%. We believe we can add many more 9s over time, as we invest more. The number of accidents will never be zero, but the key thing is that the number will be reduced over time by improving the systems.”

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