Page 11 - EE Times Europe Magazine | June2020

EE|Times EUROPE 11

AV Safety: Come Together, Right Now

common template to define them, the industry
can’t explain what a certain vehicle is capable of
doing where and under what conditions.
Though the Covid-19 pandemic has put the
brakes on most non-essential travel, Weast
said that the IEEE P2846 group still wants to
complete its draft by the end of this year or
early 2021. To expedite the process, the group
has broken the work into four subgroups. One
is identifying safety-related scenarios in which
there are assumptions about other road users.
Another is examining the attributes of safety
models used within decision-making. The third
group is aligning definitions and taxonomy with
those used by other standards as the best pos-
sible. The fourth group is documenting how the
standard fits with or complements other stan-
dards “so that we can resolve some confusion
and questions” about IEEE P2846, said Weast.
The goal for The Autonomous is to foster amity among key automotive players and The IEEE P2846 group’s roster lists Aptiv, Arm,
publish documents and technical papers reflecting state-of-the-art solutions. Baidu, Denso, Exponent, Fiat Chrysler (FCA),
Google, Huawei, Horizon Robotics, Infineon, Intel,
(Image: The Autonomous)
Kontrol, National Taiwan University, Nvidia, NXP,
Qualcomm, Uber ATG, Valeo, Volkswagen, and
assumptions that apply in those specific cases is essential to creating a Waymo. In a recent election, the members selected Weast as the chair, a
safety model for a decision-making block, he said. Waymo representative as vice chair, and an Uber delegate as secretary. For
While IEEE P2846 is focused on that decision-making block, AV Waymo, this is a first; until now, the company has opted to go it alone.
safety standards in the end are likely to require close to a dozen differ- “We now have a good representation from the chip industry, com-
ent technical blocks for the industry to define and implement safety, panies in the mobility-as-a-service business, car OEMs, Tier Ones, and
Weast speculated. “We will need, for example, a safe operation block,” robotics companies,” said Weast.
which could be addressed by ISO 26262 and SOTIF. Others include a
behavior and traffic block, “which maps well with what IEEE P2846 SAFETY CASE
offers,” and a data recording block. Separately, Underwriters Laboratories has completed and published its
It is clear that “standards and interoperability are essential” to enable first AV standard. UL 4600 is available at ULstandards.com.
an ecosystem on which an entirely new market like AV can be built, Instead of prescribing how to design for safety by following certain
said Weast. However, he acknowledged that setting industry standards steps, UL 4600 offers a guide to “build the safety case” for an AV design,
is always a balancing act. You need to said Phil Koopman, CTO of Edge Case Research, one of the authors
create a robust market, but companies of the standard. Acknowledging that no single standard can solve the
must feel free to differentiate. world’s autonomous-product problem, the authors of UL 4600 have
The specific technologies that fixed a starting point by asking autonomous-product designers to make
require AV industry consensus would a safety argument.
be those that will benefit everyone UL recruited a diverse body of international stakeholders on its
and lift all boats equally once various Standards Technical Panel (STP) to develop the document, said Koop-
implementations are commonly avail- man. The STP consists of 32 members with voting rights, including
able, said Weast. representatives of government agencies, academia, AV developers,
Consider, for example, IEEE P2846. technology suppliers, testing and standards organizations, and even
If AV companies can’t agree on what insurance companies. Members include Uber, Nissan, Argo AI, Aurora
safety means (including a safe distance Edge Case Research’s Innovation, Locomotion, Zenuity, Intel, Infineon, Bosch, Renesas,
between cars, for example), they won’t Phil Koopman Ansys, Liberty Mutual, AXA, and the U.S. Department of Transporta-
be able to make convincing arguments tion, among others. ■
to government regulators for the safety of autonomous vehicles, he
said. The same goes for operational design domains (ODDs); without a Junko Yoshida is global co-editor-in-chief at AspenCore.

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www.eetimes.eu | JUNE 2020