[msb-alumni] Study pushes new ways to measure driverless safety
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2018 15:29:44 -0400
BlankStudy pushes new ways to measure driverless safety . Michael Laris.
Assessing 'roadmanship,' a riff on good citizenship by robotic cars, is key A
typical
driving test considers basic skills: Can you parallel park? Do you merge
safely?
Do you know to yield to pedestrians? No such government exam is required
for cars driven by a computer. The idea has been dismissed by federal officials
who oppose regulation and industry leaders who say they need freedom from
rules to innovate. But a new study by the Rand Corp., funded by Uber's
autonomous vehicle division and released Thursday, tries to map out what
independent
tests of driverless safety might look like and how they might be implemented.
One key element, the authors say, would be trying to define and gauge
"roadmanship,"
a 21st-century riff on good citizenship and driving behavior by robotic cars.
Among the things that might be measured: How much space does the driverless car
leave between itself and cars to the front and sides? How much more cautious
does it become when its sensors are obscured or sightlines are bad? How
often does it jerk out of the way of another car or slam on the brakes, either
because of its own shortcomings or the poor driving of others nearby?
"We are showing the art of the possible," said Marjory Blumenthal, a senior
policy analyst at Rand. "There are many instances in which it is possible to
have a safety-relevant measure. What makes sense will vary with the
circumstances. But the world offers a lot more" than what is done today.
The study is meant to "motivate conversation within industry and within
government, and between industry and government, to see if people will move
toward a higher level," said Blumenthal, who headed a science and technology
council that advised the Obama administration.
The research was launched before a driverless Uber - a retrofitted Volvo SUV -
struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz., in March. The crash, which
remains under investigation, heightened public concerns about the
trustworthiness of the technology and the speed with which some firms are
pushing its deployment on public roads.
Noah Zych, Uber's head of system safety, said the Arizona death led the company
"to deeply reflect upon what had gotten us to that point and what improvements
we could make to our development approach." Zych said company employees feel a
"responsibility and obligation to try to share our lessons learned from that as
broadly as we can . . . so that we can help move everybody forward and
hopefully
prevent those kinds of incidents from happening, not just for ourselves in the
future, but for everyone else."
He said he was pleased other top companies proved willing to discuss safety
measurement issues with Rand, including in a workshop where a number of
driverless developers exchanged ideas. Rand cited the participation, either in
the workshop or through individual comments, of Cruise Automation, Waymo,
Intel,
Tesla, the Toyota Research Institute, Baidu and others.
Competitive considerations have hampered earlier federal calls for disclosures
and data sharing among driverless companies. The Rand study notes that roadways
have become "a living laboratory" and human drivers, passengers and pedestrians
have been made subjects in "a study that they did not consent to take part in
and cannot opt out of."
Wrestling with this and other realities will shape public acceptance of, or
hostility toward, the technology, the authors argue. Technology developers
believe "some exposure to risk and uncertainty about this risk must be
accepted"
in the near term to reap safety benefits in the long term, the authors note.
Those in the safety advocacy community, meanwhile, champion "clearer
communication about risk and more-conservative efforts to at least minimize
risk
and preferably eliminate it," the report notes. Bridging that gulf will require
finding common agreement on how to measure safety across the industry, the
authors said. They recommend that companies find more ways to share information
about safety during various stages of their work. Such a setup would allow for
the comparison of one company's simulations or driving scenarios with those
from
other companies, perhaps under the auspices of "a third party or department of
motor vehicles.
They also recommend new, formal descriptions as part of one of the most central
and wonky-sounding concepts in driverless development: the operational design
domain. That's the idea that driverless cars are designed to work only in
certain circumstances, such as during the day in good weather on downtown
streets in a particular city.
Federal policy, updated by transportation officials last week, continues to
rely
on companies submitting voluntary safety assessments to the Transportation
Department describing why they believe their vehicles are safe and where they
are meant to go. So far, just four of the dozens of companies active in the
field have made the voluntary safety reports public. California has required
companies to regularly report the number of "disengagements" by autonomous cars
rolling on its roads - that is, times when a human must take back control from
the self-driving system.
But the limitations of that tool have also been emphasized, including by the
Rand authors, who note it's not always clear what the numbers actually tell
you.
For example, more rigorous testing could lead to more disengagements - but also
safer cars.
Zych says the push for new safety measurements is also an ongoing priority. In
recent months, for example,
engineers have sought to recast pass-fail tests on its test tracks to get
repeatable and more nuanced results showing whether the cars began decelerating
sooner or changing lanes ahead of time in particular scenarios.
Engineers are also continuing to explore ways to measure "roadmanship. "They're
the sort
of leading indicators and warning signs that a system is performing in a
trustworthy way, or isn't performing in a trustworthy way, before you get to
the
stage of seeing crashes" or other problems, Zych said.
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