ESPLANADE - Safety assurance for autonomous vehicles

Tactical safety makes traffic much safer

We can view autonomous drive functions as a next step in a trend towards intervening ever earlier in the chain of events leading to an accident. We started a few decades ago with functions for passive safety, then during the first decade of this century active safety functions. With self-driving cars, we arrive at the next step, tactical safety. This means that the car, with its automated control system, prevents critical situations from even arising.

Make vehicle tasks more ambitious on a step-by-step basis

The autonomous vehicle should take full responsibility for the driving task. Therefore, the way to build up knowledge and create trust in self-driving cars is to make the autonomous driving task increasingly more complex. Once we have sufficient proof of their safety to be able to take full responsibility for market introduction, we can create acceptance in society and build up experience for the next step.

The project aimed to provide a methodology that can be applied to increasingly complex tasks to be able to guarantee the safe introduction of more and more self-driving tasks for road vehicles. This included methods to ensure that the system makes tactically safe decisions, how to show that the sensor performance is always adequate for the current driving task, which architectural patterns are useful, how to make a risk analysis and requirements breakdown for a self-driving function, and how to show that the driver interaction is safe.