Philip Koopman

 This is a lecture from my CMU graduate course on safety architecture and redundancy patterns. It describes numerous patterns that involve redundancy used for fault detection (fail silent), redundancy used for avai…

The recent CrowdStrike IT outage has focused attention on a topic rarely discussed, but fundamental to mission-critical systems: common cause failures. While this particular outage affected business and airlines more th…

aviation

SDV failures might have poor architectural cohesion and coupling as a critical factor. We’re reading about high profile software fiascos in car companies, and how they might be handling them, for example: The $5B VW bet…

MB has softened their stance on Level 3 liability, but they still don't really have your back when it matters. Good news: Mercedes Benz has improved their position on driver liability. Bad news: But they’re not there ye…

We should formally define SAE Level 2+ to be a feature that includes not only Level 2 abilities but also the ability to change its travel path via intersections and/or interchanges. Level 2+ should be regulated in the s…

The past year has seen both peak hype and significant issues for the automated vehicle industry. In this talk we recap general trends and summarize the current situation for autonomous vehicles such as robotaxis, as wel…

self-driving cars

Waymo vs. utility pole smackdown: the utility pole won. No apparent extenuating circumstances. Nobody was injured; the vehicle was empty. The pole suffered a minor dent but is still in service. This video has an intervi…

self-driving cars

Since I've been a part of the academic publication ecosystem for decades (as have some of my readers), I'll share some thoughts on the latest publication quality scandals: Junior faculty are suffering from an ever-incre…

 Any company testing on public roads should conform to the industry standard for road testing safety: SAE J3018.  When AV road testing first started, it was common for testers to claim that they were safe…

Challenges in Autonomous Vehicle Safety Assessment Recorded live at a US DOT workshop on May 29, 2024. Knowing whether an autonomous vehicle is safe enough to operate on public roads is an extremely difficult challenge.…

 On October 2, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi dragged a woman 20 feet underneath the vehicle in San Francisco. The circumstances of the mishap and everything else are complex. But the robotaxi industry was profoundly shak…

self-driving cars

 Talk for EV Society of Canada, May 7, 2024 -- recorded as a live webinar Safety will ultimately be the deciding factor for the viability of autonomous vehicle technology. Despite various pronouncements and hype ov…

NHTSA has a new rule out requiring high-capability Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in new vehicles from 2029. Some key points from an initial read-through of the new NHTSA AEB Rule document are below. NHTSA points out…

 The following definitions were proposed at the recent Dagstuhl workshop and will be incorporated in an upcoming Safecomp paper. These below text is hereby placed in the public domain, with a specific objective of…

 This opinion piece claims that a Tesla software update should not be a recall. I'm calling bullsh*t. Article Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-believe-the-tesla-headlines-safety-recall-software-update-c2e95f…

On October 2, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi Autonomous Vehicle (AV) in San Francis-co struck and then later – as part of different maneuver – dragged a pedestrian under the vehicle as part of a more complex road mishap. …

self-driving cars

Cruise has released materials from an investigation into the pedestrian dragging incident and related external communication transparency failures of last October. There is a lot to unpack, but remarkably little of it t…

Vay is deploying tele-driven cars in Las Vegas. At a first pass they have done some safety homework, but open questions remain that they should address to instill public confidence. I spent some time doing background re…

education