The ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Technology Expo conference (rates apply) has begun. Mohamed Brahmi (below), policy officer on regulations for autonomous driving and connected vehicles at the European Commission, kicked off proceedings with a presentation titled ‘EU regulations for assisted and automated driving’, in which he explained the regulatory framework for EU and UNECE, as well as the overall concept behind ADAS/AD regulation, its current status and next steps.
Philip Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, followed. Koopman, an outspoken safety advocate, emphasized the fact that removing the human driver fundamentally changes what we mean by ‘acceptable safety’. During an extensive presentation, he argued that a simplistic ‘safer than human driver’ positive risk balance approach must be augmented with additional considerations regarding risk transfer, negligent driving behavior, standards conformance, absence of unreasonable fine-grain risk, ethics and equity concerns.
After sharing examples of safety issues in the news, Koopman (left) pushed the industry to work harder on devising clearer, more acceptable safety definitions for at-scale deployments. He explained, “Current standards frameworks and accompanying definitions are likely to be inadequate to ensure safety, due to implicit assumptions that are violated when the human driver is removed.”
In another early conference highlight, Dr Trent Victor (below), director of safety research and best practices at Waymo, explained how the rapidly growing robotaxi company determines the safety of the Waymo Driver, and gave a summary of the latest evidence to support its safety record to date. The company recently published research showing that compared with cars driven by humans, the Waymo Driver has safer interactions with vulnerable road users, and far fewer injury-involving intersection crashes and crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries.
The conference will feature over 75 speakers across three full days. Other highlights on Day 1 will include presentations from ASAM, Cariad, Plus and Wayve.
The conference will continue on Wednesday, May 21, and Thursday, May 22. Click here to purchase a delegate pass.
