Autonomous Vehicle Safety: An Interdisciplinary Challenge



Autonomous Vehicle Safety: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

By Phil Koopman & Mike Wagner

Abstract:
Ensuring the safety of fully autonomous vehicles requires a multi-disciplinary approach across all the levels of functional hierarchy, from hardware fault tolerance, to resilient machine learning, to cooperating with humans driving conventional vehicles, to validating systems for operation in highly unstructured environments, to appropriate regulatory approaches. Significant open technical challenges include validating inductive learning in the face of novel environmental inputs and achieving the very high levels of dependability required for full-scale fleet deployment. However, the biggest challenge may be in creating an end-to-end design and deployment process that integrates the safety concerns of a myriad of technical specialties into a unified approach.

Read the preprint version here for free (link / .pdf)

Official IEEE version (subscription required):
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7823109/  
DOI: 10.1109/MITS.2016.2583491

IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (Volume: 9, Issue: 1, Spring 2017, pp. 90-96)

Correction:
"This would require a safety level of about 1 billion operating hours per catastrophic event. (FAA 1988)" should be
"This would require a safety level of about 1 billion operating hours per catastrophic event due to the failure of a particular function. (FAA 1988)"  (Note that in this context a "function" is something quite high level such as the ability to provide sufficient thrust from the set of jet engines mounted on the airframe.)

Embedded System Safety Overview (Preview)

Here's a summary overview video on Embedded System Safety.  (See additional pointers below.)


Embedded Software Safety Preview [ECR]

Other pointers on this topic (my blog posts unless otherwise noted):
On-line resources:
John Knight's book: Fundamentals of Dependable Computing for Software Engineers (2012) is an excellent current book on software dependability and safety.

Nancy Leveson has some great publications in the area of software safety, and is credited for developing this as an academic field. Anyone doing software safety should read at least these:
For more about Edge Case Research and how to subscribe to our video training channel, please see this Blog posting.

Guest on Embedded.fm Podcast

Elecia & Chris invited me to chat with them on this week's Embedded.fm podcast and it was a lot of fun.

You can check out my episode here:

http://embedded.fm/episodes/183

Also, I highly recommend listening to Jack Ganssle's excellent episode 53: "Being a grownup engineer"

http://embedded.fm/episodes/53

Scroll through the episode list.  I'm episode 183 so you can tell they've been at this quite a while. There's a lot of great stuff to listen to.

Note added Tue. 1/17:  books are back in stock in Amazon.

Meanwhile, if you are ordering from the US, the best deal on the book is via paypal here: http://koopman.us/

Language Use (Coding Style for Compilers) Overview Video

Here's a summary video on Language Use (Coding Style for Compilers) which is half of the topic of coding style.

Other pointers on this topic (my blog posts unless otherwise noted):
For more about Edge Case Research and how to subscribe to our video training channel, please see this Blog posting.

Avoiding Embedded System Stack Overflow (Preview)

Here's a summary video on avoiding Stack Overflow. 

Stack Overflow Preview [ECR]


Other pointers on this topic (my blog posts unless otherwise noted):

Other useful pointers:
For more about Edge Case Research and how to subscribe to our video training channel, please see this Blog posting.