Keeping autonomous vehicles safe at system level

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Keeping autonomous vehicles safe at system level

http://www.automotive-iq.com/chassis-systems/articles/keeping-autonomous-vehicles-safe-system-level

Contributor: Graham Heeps | Posted: 08/22/2016

The rate of technological development and investment in autonomous vehicles is accelerating. We’re still a long way from fully driverless, ‘Level 5’ vehicles, but the announcements keep on coming.

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“System safety is an industry-wide and societal issue,” offers Randy Visintainer, director of autonomous vehicles at the Ford Motor Company, which will this year triple its fleet of Fusion Hybrid autonomous research vehicles. “We need consistent approaches, and all stakeholders – government, automakers, suppliers, insurance companies and consumer advocate groups – need to participate in this discussion. The most important principle as we move forward is achieving both continued innovation and improved public safety. We would encourage vehicle safety standards to be handled at the federal level in the US. And we urge the US to work with other regions of the world to harmonize future standards.”

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“The testing requirements are pretty minimal and the first reports we received from seven companies for last year [11 are licensed] showed the types of things that were still causing problems for the vehicles,” says Brian Soublet, chief council and deputy director of the Legal Affairs Division at the California DMV. “The draft deployment regulation was completed prior to us receiving those reports. But they did reaffirm some of the concerns that we have, which are that the vehicles still face some obstacles in operating under certain conditions. In the draft regulation we took that in mind in that we did not want to see the vehicles capable of operating under conditions in which the manufacturers knew they were incapable of operating.”

Soublet notes that the sun blinding the sensors or cameras, or lack of lane-marking detection during rain, as two conditions where technical challenges remain. One of the concerns raised at public consultation sessions on the draft regulations earlier this year came from manufacturers who will have to submit their vehicles to a third-party for certification testing prior to deployment. That’s different to how things are normally done in the US, where vehicles are self-certified by manufacturers and if there’s an unreasonable risk to safety, the National Highway and Transport Administration (NHTSA) can order a recall. The need to define standards against which vehicles can be judged highlights the problem for state regulators trying to balance the future safety benefits of advancing autonomous technology with maintaining public safety in the short term. Fortunately, it looks like developments at a national level could soon help answer the question for DMVs across the USA.

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