Although media stories have for the past decade been hailing the imminent availability of vehicles that will completely take over the driving task from humans, reality will be far more prosaic. The coming decades will see increasingly wide availability of driving assistance systems that operate under continuous supervision of human drivers to enhance safety and driving comfort and convenience. The automated driving systems that perform the complete dynamic driving task are likely to be limited to specific commercial fleet applications, under tightly constrained geographic and operational conditions, and with remote human assistance, for the foreseeable future. This lecture will explain the reasoning behind these predictions based on the presenter’s nearly fifty years of experience working on automated driving technology and planning issues.
The challenges to deployment of automation systems that can replace human drivers will be explained from multiple perspectives, based on the presenter’s experience developing automated driving systems, evaluating their transportation system impacts, and assisting regulators in assessing their safety. These challenges will be discussed in terms of:
- The high safety baseline set by human driving in today’s safety statistics;
- The technological challenges in environment perception, prediction of actions of other road users, cyber-security and software safety verification and validation;
- The economic challenges posed by high costs of developing the technology, extending it to new locations and operating conditions, and equipping and maintaining the vehicles;
- The human factors and public perception challenges of accurately informing the public about the capabilities and limitations of the automation technology;
- The combined technological and institutional challenges of producing a robust safety case to prove adequate safety of an automated driving system;
- The natural inertia inherent in capital-intensive industries such as motor vehicles and civil infrastructure, in contrast to Silicon Valley information technology.