Study pushes new ways to measure driverless safety
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 21stcentury riff on good citizenship and driving behaviour 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, Arizona, 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.
“I do think there’s an appetite for that kind of collaboration, recognising that incidents that occur for any one company affect all companies and affect the industry as a whole,” Zych said.
Competitive considerations have hampered earlier federal calls for disclosures and data sharing among driverless companies to promote safety, and its unclear how much that might change. The authors redoubled calls for such sharing between companies and with the government.
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.”