People and Robots Seminar

Automated driving is breaking new ground where "smart", connected and eventually collaborating machines are deployed for increasingly complex tasks in unstructured environments. This provides a wonderful stage with numerous opportunities and challenges, especially considering the societal impact and broad variety of applications, from automated machines in mines to SAE level 4 automated cars. This stage is representative of an ongoing technological shift, with similar trends in many other domains. However, current methodologies are not well prepared for such future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), requiring new systems and safety engineering approaches to be established. In this talk I will address limitations of existing engineering methodologies, and in particular those of safety engineering. Traditional safety engineering is focused on structured environments and risk reduction, which based on risk assessment and the definition of corresponding risk reducing measures. For CPS and so called functional safety, the approaches are to a large extent process-based and treat software as deterministic. Common safety engineering patterns include the use of "safety functions" that are separate from the  nominal system and that are simple enough to be "certified" w.r.t. the identified risk level. Using this context, I will discuss the design and assurance of highly automated vehicles, elaborating a number of perspectives to the challenges and directions, emphasizing the role of controlled experimental environments, providing minimal performance requirements, and accelerating the development of safety engineering guidelines. I will describe our ongoing work on so called safety supervisor architectures and their design. A conceptual architectural design of a fault-tolerant autonomous driving intelligence will be presented, encompassing a nominal and a safety supervisor channel. I will discuss hazardous events, their sources, the design space in terms of redundancy and diversity, the division of responsibilities among the channels, when the supervisor should take over, and remaining open challenges. In architecting future automated vehicles it is essential that viewpoints and solution strategies from controls, computer science, computer engineering, AI/ML, safety and classical vehicle engineering are brought together.

Speaker: Martin Torngren, Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan Royal Institute of Technology

Editor's Note: Susmit Jha, SRI International, was originally scheduled to speak on this date.  His talk has not been rescheduled.