BEAUTIFUL VIEW

There are three bins for self-driving car safety: (1) Obviously dangerous(2) NOT obviously dangerous, and(3) Safe.Road testing and driving scenario coverage can help you get from bin 1 to bin 2.Getting to Safe (bin 3) requires a whole lot more. That's because it requires handling...

FiveAI has published an autonomous vehicle safety approach that includes independent verification, transparency, and data sharing. (I provided inputs to the @_FiveAI  authors.)Here is a pointer to the summary on Mediumhttps://medium.com/@_FiveAI/we-need-an-industry-wide-safety-certification-framework-for-autonomous-vehicles-fiveai-publishes-1139dacd5a8cIt's...

Zachary Pezzementi and Trenton Tabor have done some great work on perception systems in general, and how image degradation affects things.  I'd previously posted information about their paper, but now there is a webinar available here:    Webinar home page with details...

I enjoyed being on a panel at the Annual OESA Suppliers Conference today. My intro talk covered setting reasonable expectations about how much safety benefit autonomous vehicles can provide in the near-term to mid-term. Spoiler: when you hear that 94% of all road fatalities are caused by bad and impaired drivers, that number doesn't mean what you...

Summary: Uber's reports indicate that they are taking improving their safety culture seriously. Their new approach to public road testing seems reasonable in light of current practices. Whether they can achieve an appropriate level of system safety and software quality for the final production vehicles remains an open question -- just as it does for...

I'm presenting this paper at SAFECOMP this today2018 SAFECOMP Paper PreprintAbstract. This paper documents the state of automotive computer-based system safety practices based on experiences with unintended acceleration litigation spanning multiple vehicle makers. There is a wide...

Victoria Australia has just issued new guidelines regarding Automated Driving System (ADS) testing.  These should be required reading for anyone doing on-road testing elsewhere in the world. There is just too much good stuff here to miss.  And, the guidelines are accompanied by actual laws that are designed to make autonomy testing safe.A...

These are the slides I presented at the AAMVA International Conference, August 22, 2018 in Philadelphia PA.It's an update of my PennDOT AV Summit presentation from earlier this year.  A key takeaway is that the lesson that we should be learning from the tragic Uber fatality in Tempe AZ earlier this year is:- Do NOT blame the victim- Do NOT blame...

One of the speakers at AVS last month mentioned that there was a Code of Practice for ADAS design (basically, level 1 and level 2 autonomy).  And that there is a proposal to update it over the next few years for higher autonomy levels.A written set of uniform practices is generally...

Every once in a while I hear about a self-driving car test or deployment program that plans to operate at lower speeds (for example, under 25 mph) to lower risk. Intuitively that sounds good, but I thought it would be interesting to dig deeper and see what turns up.There have been...

UPDATE 8/17 -- added presentation slides!I'm very pleased to share a publication from our NREC autonomy validation team that explains how computationally cheap image perturbations and degradations can expose catastrophic perception brittleness issues.  You don't need adversarial...

PennDOT has just issued new Automated Vehicle Testing Guidance:       July 2018 PennDOT AV Testing Guidance (link to acrobat document)(also, there is a press release.)It's only been a short three months since the PA AV Summit in which PennDOT took up...

It's common for autonomous vehicles to use road map data, sign data, and so on for their operation. But what if that data has a problem?Consider that while some data is being mapped by the vehicle manufacturers, they might be relying upon other data as well.  For example, some...

As the self-driving car industry works to create safer vehicles, it is facing a significant regulatory challenge.  Complying with existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) can be difficult or impossible for advanced designs. For conventional vehicles the FMVSS...

It was great to have the opportunity to participate in a panel on autonomous vehicle validation and safety at AVS in San Francisco this past week.  Thanks especially to Steve Shladover for organizing such an excellent forum for discussion.The discussion was the super-brief version. If you want to dig deeper, you can find much more complete slide...

Our Robustness Testing team at CMU/NREC presented a great paper at ICSE on the things we learned on five years with the Automated Stress Testing for Autonomy Systems (ASTAA) project across 11 projects, finding 150 significant bugs.Paper at CMUSlides at CMU Robustness Testing of...

Here is a slide deck that expands upon the idea that the heavy tail ceiling is a problem for AV validation. It also explains ways to augment image sensor inputs to improve robustness. Safety Validation and Edge Case Testing for Autonomous Vehicles from Philip Koopman (If slideshare is blocked for you, try this alternate download sour...

I enjoyed participating in the AV Benchmarking Panel hosted by Clemson ICAR last week.  Here are my slides and a preprint of my position paper on the Heavy Tail Ceiling problem for AV safety testing.AbstractCreating safe autonomous vehicles will require not only extensive training and testing against realistic operational scenarios, but also dealing...

Automated cars are unlikely to get rid of all the "94% human error" mishaps that are often cited as a safety rationale. But there is certainly room for improvement compared to human drivers. Let's sort out the hype from the data.You've heard that the reason we desperately need automated...

I'm quoted in this article by Junko Yoshida on Mobileye's approach to AV safety.Can Mobileye Validate ‘True Redundancy’?Intel/Mobileye’s robocars start running in JerusalemJunko Yoshida5/22/2018 02:01 PM EDT...Issues include how to achieve “true redundancy” in perception, how to explain objectively what “safe” really means, and how to formulate “a...

I'm quoted in this article by Junko Yoshida regarding on-road AV testing safety:Did Uber Do Enough to Make Test AVs Safe?Junko Yoshida, Chief International Correspondent5/26/2018 05:01 PM EDT"The NTSB preliminary report exposes two issues. One is the immaturity of Uber's AV software stack. Another is the absence of an Uber safety strategy in creating...

I enjoyed presenting at AutoSens 2018 today.   The audience was very engaged and asked great questions.Here are my slides. (If you seen my other recent slide decks probably not a lot of surprises, but I remixed things to emphasize perception validation.) Approaches to Validating Autonomous Vehicle Safety from Philip Koopman...

On Thursday I had the honor to presenting to two Secretaries of Transportation at the 2018 U.S.-China Transportation Forum in Beijing China.  (US Secretary Chao and China Secretary Yang were in the front row -- as well as a huge room full of US and China delegates.)  It was a really interesting experience, and I truly appreciate the support...

I'm presenting a paper on AV safety validation at the 2018 SAE World Congress.  Here's the unofficial version of the presentation and a preprint of the paper.Toward a Framework for Highly Automated Vehicle Safety ValidationPhilip Koopman & Michael Wagner2018 SAE World Congress / SAE 2018-01-1071Abstract:Validating the safety of Highly Automated...

This is the slide version of my op-ed on how to make self-driving car testing safe.The take-away is create a test vehicle with a written safety case that addresses these topics:Show that the safety driver is paying adequate attentionShow that the safety driver has time to react if neededShow that AV disengagement/safing actually works when things go...

The UK already has a pretty good answer for how to do self-driving car testing safely. US stakeholders could learn something from it.You can see the document for yourself at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/446316/pathway-driverless-cars.pdfAs...