Autonomous vehicle companies band together with safety guidelines

When it comes to developing and testing self-driving cars or building the software and parts that grant them the power to drive autonomously, it’s often considered the wild west here in the U.S. 

So to get the future of high-level autonomous driving on the same page, Aptiv, Audi, Baidu, BMW, Continental, Daimler, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Here Technologies, Infineon, Intel, and Volkswagen came together with itheir “Safety First for Automated Driving” publication, released Tuesday. 

This isn’t about technical solutions to make self-driving cars safer, but an overall look at how the industry monitors and reports safety standards while building, testing, and operating autonomous vehicles. 

Cities and states — and even the federal government — are often scrambling to put together regulations and rules on Level 3 and 4 automation for testing without a driver, submitting accident reports during public road tests, voluntary safety reports, remote monitoring, and so many other new, unscripted situations that come up with robo-cars.

The paper lays out 12 guiding principles of automated driving: safe operation; operational design domain; vehicle operator-initiated handover; security; user responsibility; vehicle-initiated handover; interdependency between the vehicle operator and the automated system; safety assessment; data recording; passive safety; behavior in traffic; and a safety layer. 

Each principle is supposed to work together, whether it’s about the testing process or design of automated cars with the overall goal of safety. The group wants to make sure autonomous vehicles aren’t suppressed by over-regulation and overly conservative standards and designs, but instead supports a robust list of capabilities. Autonomous vehicles should be able to know where they’re located, predict future behavior, and create a legal and safe driving plan and then follow it. If things do go wrong, the vehicle needs to be able to handle that and have contingency and communication plans.

There’s a whole section on “elements” such as radar, cameras, HD maps, LiDAR, and other sensors and equipment and another outlining standards for simulation testing. 

Here’s the full 100-page paper (plus appendices, a glossary, and references):

Uber, Waymo, and Cruise (and others, like Apple) were not part of the paper and the suggested guidelines.

For the TL;DR, this is a set of proposed guidelines to make sure autonomous driving systems are made, tested, and used in a safe and consistent way. At the end of the paper, the group writes, “This is not a one-off publication but should be viewed as a first version.” The next versions will eventually work toward international standardization for autonomous vehicles — one step at a time.