Unfortunately, this is reckless, misleading hype of the worse kind. It reads like this process is safe and tenable. When it is nothing of the sort. It produces massive false confidence which cannot be tolerated. Making an untenable process that kills people for no reason as safe as possible is not an accomplishment.
The FACT of the matter is the process Uber and most AV makers use, public shadow and safety driving, can literally never yield anything close to a true autonomous vehicle, has killed for no reason and will kill many, many more needlessly. (Elaine Herzberg being the first.)
It is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition, the process harms people for no reason. This occurs two ways. The first is through handover or fall back. A process that cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way, especially in time critical scenarios. The other dangerous area is training the systems to handle accident scenarios. In order do that AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times. that will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The solution is aerospace/DoD simulation technology and systems/safety engineering. (Not gaming engine-based systems as they have significant real-time and model fidelity flaws in complex scenarios).
(Eric — You have a DoD simulation engineer on staff initials RF. I have to hope he is telling you, or would tell you if you asked, what I am saying here. If he is LISTEN to him. If not, then something is amiss. I will be glad to prove all of this to you.)
More in my articles here
Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle Development — NONSENSE
All the Autonomous Vehicle makers combined would not get remotely close to L4
Common Misconceptions about Aerospace/DoD/FAA Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine-End Public Shadow Driving
