Safe Autonomy

Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) are defined by chapter 16 of ANSI/UL 4600 in the context of autonomous vehicles as performance metrics that are specifically related to safety (4600 at 16.1.1.6.1). This is a fairly general definition that is intended to encompass both leading metrics (e.g., number of failed detections of pedestrians for a single sensor channel) and lagging metrics (e.g., number of collisions in real world operation).   However, it is so general that there can be a tendency to try to call metrics that are not related to safety SPIs when, more properly, they are really KPIs. As an example, ride quality smoothness when cornering is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that is highly desirable for passenger comfort. But it might have little or nothing to do with the crash rate for a particular vehicle. (It might be correlated -- sloppy control might be associated with crashes, but it might not be.) So we've come up with a more precise definition of SPI (with special t

This is a short course lecture series that runs about 5 hours total.   YouTube pointers: L100: Look Who's Driving ( PBS Nova )    ( Alternate for non-USA ) L101: Intro (9 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L102:Validating Machine Learning-Based Systems (13 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L103:SOTIF & Edge Cases (11 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L104:Implications of Removing the Human Driver (16 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L105:Safety Architectures (14 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L106:How Safe is Safe Enough? (11 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L107:Building Trust (10 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L108: Getting to Deployed + Safe (8 slides) -- Playlist | Single Video L109: UL 4600 Key Ideas -- Playlist | Single Video L120: Overview of Automated Vehicle Terminology and J3016 Levels -- Playlist | Single Video For those who don't have access to YouTube, an alternate source for these videos is archive.org: L101 / L102 / L103 / L104 /