The 2019 Automated Vehicles Symposium kicked off on Tuesday with a focus on safety, as speakers from across the industry — and the world — addressed how their companies are building safe self-driving vehicles and working to educate the public about the technology.
 
Chris Urmson, cofounder and CEO of automated vehicle technology company Aurora, was the first keynote speaker and described how the industry has progressed during his time in it. In the early and mid 2000s he was part of the Carnegie Mellon team competing in DARPA's robotic road races, where his vehicle sometimes found itself upside down.
 
A decade or so later, when he headed up Google's self-driving efforts, the company enabled a legally blind man to run errands in a self-driving car, illustrating how far and fast the technology had progressed.
 
The technology has moved "from vehicles driving across the desert, looking like Frankencars, to billions of dollars of investment" and self-driving cars nearing production.
 
Before that happens, there has to be a focus on safety, Urmson said, including a need to define exactly what that means.
 
"To us, it means being free of unreasonable risk," he said. "If you'd like a perfectly safe car, park it in your garage and wrap it up in bubble wrap."
 
Aurora is focusing on several aspects of safety. As an example, Urmson described the company's work on defining a self-driving car's behavior around yellow lights — when should it go through, and when should it stop?
 
"This is not about being first for being first's sake, but we have to be safe in bringing this technology to the market," he said.
 
For example, the company's car operators are put through a six-week training program and are employees, not contractors. 
 
"We don't view them as expendable," he said. "We don't just set them loose on the road and hope it all works out."
 
Any employee can ground the fleet for any reason, he said, citing one instance where engineers noticed that Aurora's cars were failing to see oncoming traffic between 60 and 80 meters away due to a bug in a software update. The vehicles were pulled off the roads until that was fixed.
 
Sharing safety
 
Ride-sharing company Uber announced it has made its safety case public and is sharing it with any industry partners who want to build on it. 
 
Noah Zych, the chief of staff for Uber's Advanced Technology Group, said the question now is not whether the systems are safe, but are the companies developing it trustworthy, and are the regulators trustworthy.
 
"We have a responsibility ... to earn that trust," he said. 
 
Uber's goal is to make its work accessible to the public and to share data within the industry.
 
"It can't be us simply saying here's what we're doing, we have to listen," Zych said. "Actively sharing knowledge within the industry is incredibly important ... we think we will all sink or swim together."
 
The company printed a voluntary safety self-assessment and hired an outside company to assess its safety culture, and published safety reviews after a fatal crash in Arizona last year.
 
"There is no single way to prove safety." but a company can create an argument that it has achieved an acceptable level of risk, he said. 
 
One way to do that is by publishing its safety case, an approach that "has often been employed by other safety-critical industries, including aerospace, rail, and medical devices," wrote Eric Meyhofer, CEO of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, on a web posting published on July 16, the same day Zych announced it at the conference.
 
"A safety case should communicate a comprehensive and defensible argument that, when coupled with articles of evidence convinces key stakeholders that the risk of harm from the system has been reduced to an acceptable level."
 
Information about Uber's safety case is located here: https://uberatg.com/safetycase/.
 
Anyone is free to use the framework, Zych said, either in partnership with Uber or on their own. 
 
The Automated Vehicles Symposium 2019, sponsored by AUVSI and TRB, continues Wednesday and Thursday, with ancillary meetings on Friday.

Below: Aurora's Chris Urmson addresses the AVS conference. Photo: AUVSI