Driverless Vehicles — Crash Cases or Bust
Please ignore the shiny objects or videos autonomous vehicle makers show you. It’s hype. The real measure of driverless technology capabilities is the edge and accident cases learned as well as disengagement data no one is providing. (Many crash cases are not edge or corner cases as they are very common from a scenario POV. Humans avoiding them lowers the bad outcomes but not how often the mechanics of the scenarios occur.)
As the hype and self-induced industry collapse continues, we see AV makers lying about having full L4 systems, scrambling to cash in on IPO’s SPACs or merging to delay the inevitable bankruptcy, providing cherry-picked and overall meaningless and misleading data and piling on Tesla for committing the same basic sins they are.
If an AV maker, let’s say Waymo in this case since they say they have fully driverless systems (though only 10% have no “safety driver” and they provide zero real proof of this capability), actually had a driverless system, wouldn’t they trip over themselves providing data to prove it? What better way to differentiate yourself from others and earn public and government trust? Trust me if Waymo or anyone else could prove they were legitimately at L4, even 2 times better than a human, they would. Instead, we get misleading cherry-picked data bits without the real data we need. That being scenarios learned, especially edge and accident scenarios, disengagement data and proof of fidelity of all simulation models if they used simulation to acquire the data. Why are these folks not providing this data? Because they literally cannot do it without injuring or killing people. In order for many of these scenarios to be learned the “safety driver” has to avoid disengaging and letting the scenario happen. Think that through.
Of course, this is all avoidable
More details on my POV here
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — Simulation’s Next Generation
· https://www.sae.org/news/2020/08/new-gen-av-simulation
Autonomous Vehicle Industry Rush to SPACs and IPOs is a Very Bad Sign
My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.
Key Autonomous Vehicle Industry Participation
- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)
- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee
- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 DoD/DHS Whistleblowing Efforts
