Safety Experts calling for Driverless Safety Standards are Missing the Root Cause of Why Humans are being Harmed and the Industry is Collapsing
The Article
The Road Has Rules But Not So Much For AV Makers
https://www.eetimes.com/the-road-has-rules-but-not-so-much-for-av-makers/#
The Quotes
· As Barnden noted, “If an AV test-level vehicle kills a single pedestrian or a child, that leads straight to President Biden.”
· To that point, Colin Barnden, lead analyst at Semicast Research, told us: “The FDA does not permit new drugs to be developed on random passers-by, neither does the FAA permit experimental aircraft designs to be tested over densely populated areas.” He stressed, “Endlessly driving the same routes with nothing bad happening and no one getting killed doesn’t prove the safety case of a new technology. NHTSA (and state regulators) have a responsibility to ensure the safety of the public, not to act as enablers of experimental technology being tested on non-consenting subjects.”
· As Philip Koopman, co-founder and CTO of Edge Case Research and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, noted, “Many of the VSSAs do a sort of standards roll call without really committing to do anything specific in a mentioned standard. Vague statements that amount to picking and choosing pieces of standards don’t really tell us what companies are doing about safety.” He calls it “#ISOwashing.”
The Response
First- there is nothing Barden, Koopman or Straub stated will keep that first child or family from being killed. Despite the incremental epiphanies, they are still part of the problem. (Note Barden does not include the drivers in his statement above. Only the public around them.)
Second — VSSA is a joke. Koopman is correct. They mean nothing. Not only that though, but they are also purposefully misleading and meant to inspire false confidence in order to increase trust and funding. If these companies really had L4 systems they would release the list of learned scenarios, all disengagements and root causes. (Koopman states Argo’s standards response is well intentioned. This shows his is still the tail being wagged by the reckless dog. The statement is anything but well intentioned. And notice neither Koopman, Barden or anyone else asks for the data I just mentioned.)
Third — the incremental epiphanies are important. The problem is they are being created as a reaction to tragedy and tempered by people’s desires to go morph with the wind and rewrite history versus leading the right change. The industry’s hastened pace is still stifled by ego and financial concerns. At this rate we will need the death of the first child or family to get to where I have been for four years. Setting this aside, while they are fundamentally correct about the impact standards can have, these folks and the industry still doesn’t get it. None of those standards means a thing if the development and test approach is untenable from a safety, time, and money POV. The industry is needlessly using, harming, and killing humans as Guinea pigs needlessly. And it will harm and kill many more. All in a futile attempt to get to a point where this Hari-kari is for the greater good. As the current approach can never get near L4.
It is a myth that public shadow and safety driving can create a legitimate autonomous vehicle. And the lives the process takes are necessary and for the greater good. It is impossible to drive the trillion miles or spend $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. The process also harms people for no reason. The first safety issue is handover. The time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing, especially in time critical scenarios. cannot be provided. Another dangerous area is learning accident scenarios. AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times to accomplish this. That will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The next issues is the use of gaming based simulation technology which has too many technical limitations to facilitate the creation of a legitimate real-world digital twin. The solution is to use DoD simulation technology and shift most of the autonomous system development and testing over to it. The ONLY folks who get this, who don’t require the wind of echo chamber acceptability to guide them, is the USDOT VOICES team.
More details on my POV here
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now
USDOT introduces VOICES Proof of Concept for Autonomous Vehicle Industry-A Paradigm Shift?
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — Simulation’s Next Generation
· https://www.sae.org/news/2020/08/new-gen-av-simulation
The NTSB frets over human Guinea pigs then chastises and punts to the even more reckless NHTSA
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.
Industry Participation — Air and Ground
- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Member UNECE WP.29 SG2 Virtual Testing
- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)
- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation
- Member CIVATAglobal — Civic Air Transport Association
- 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
