Who is going to prove L4 and no need for “safety driver” first?
Wow!! So many companies getting rid of “safety drivers” and attaining SAE L4 withing a couple months of each other. More will come soon as the hype and desperation domino tumbling picks up speed, especially avoidable tragedies with the loss of in vehicle safety drivers. (They should not exist at all. Having said this, they are far better off in the vehicle since remote ops adds significant latency.)
· L4 and Removed Safety Drivers — Waymo, Cruise, Yandex, Gatik
· Removed Safety Drivers — Motional, AutoX, Baidu
· Zoox and Voyage appear to pop any day now
Of course, NONE of them provides any significant proof of their capabilities. You know why Tesla, Uber and Lyft can’t say they have something they don’t? They don’t use employees as Guinea pigs they can control. Tesla uses its customers and the rideshare folks would not be able to silence their customers. This funding pump will not make it through the new year.
So, who will provide meaning proof first?
The answer?
When someone produces something legitimate.
Trust me if these systems could be proven to be even 2X a human and it could be proven, someone would do it as a differentiator. They would be challenging others to do the same. It’s all about the light of day
When someone is doing something of significance they don’t need to hype or hide data. Yes, they will hide data on how they do it. But not that they do it. Particularly in this industry where money is drying up, valuations have dropped tremendously, companies are going bankrupt and the public’s trust keeps going down.
The Signs of Significance
· Providing Disengagement and the associated Root Cause Data
· Show Tested Scenarios
· Providing proof that the scenarios have been properly developed and tested and the simulation used is a legitimate digital twin
· They drive the creation of Testable Safety Standards and Scenarios
· The edge, corner cases or long-tails cited are not dumbed down
· Remote Operation companies will admit lag over 16msec is a problem. As well as the resulting lack of motion cues. They will then limit their use cases accordingly, especially on public roads. And explain there may be times inadequate and dangerous remote ops may be the best of several bad options.
More in my articles here
The Miracle of Coincident Removal of “Safety Drivers” or Reaching L4 Autonomy
Be Wary of Waymo’s New Safety Record and Brad Templeton’s Declaration the System is Superhuman and should be Deployed Today
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — Simulation’s Next Generation (featuring Dactle)
· https://www.sae.org/news/2020/08/new-gen-av-simulation
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now
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 Industry Participation
- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)
- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts
My company is Dactle
We are building an aerospace/DoD/FAA level D, full L4/5 simulation-based testing and AI system with an end-state scenario matrix to address several of the critical issues in the AV/OEM industry I mentioned in my articles below. This includes replacing 99.9% of public shadow and safety driving. As well as dealing with significant real-time, model fidelity and loading/scaling issues caused by using gaming engines and other architectures. (Issues Unity will confirm. We are now working together. We are also working with UAV companies). If not remedied these issues will lead to false confidence and performance differences between what the Plan believes will happen and what actually happens. If someone would like to see a demo or discuss this further please let me know.
