Autonomous Driving - Testing
Pankaj Mahajan
VP, Engineering & Business leader in Digital Transformation, Mobility, Electrification, Autonomy, Robotics, Connectivity, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Energy and New Technologies
Public Safety has quickly taken the center stage in the world of Autonomous Driving. Therefore, several OEMs have lately been bragging about 'millions of test miles' they have accumulated to create a virtual halo of safety around their products & services.
IMO, validations of Autonomous Vehicles by the “number of miles driven” is an old-school way of testing. Although performing virtual simulations is a well known preliminary method of verification & validation but on-road testing is still the most effective and reliable way to ensure public safety of Autonomous Vehicles.
Defining & assessing safety of an AV is a separate non-ending debate. However, a few new start-up OEMs may use faster & more reliable on-road validation methods (without blindly racking-up millions of miles on public roads) not only to catch up with the popular AD leaders like Waymo or Baidu but also to successfully mass produce their own safe AVs in leading automotive markets of the world. Cheers !
#autonomousdriving #autonomous #adas #ad #av #ai
Great point. Blindly racking up miles skews up the true measure of safety indeed. AVs are still new and I think standardization has to be made to test these vehicles in several unique scenarios which affect safety. Perhaps building new proving grounds purely for AV testing, incorporating most challenging edge cases in the design of the facility might prove helpful.
Given that safety (a.k.a. Zero Loss of human life) is paramount, finding "faster and more reliable on-road validation" may indeed be the holy grail!