Set the self-driving safety bar high: Oxa demands explainability in data sharing
As well as a long-awaited first ever ride in a self-driving car on public roads in the UK, our recent visit to Oxa featured an exceptional roundtable discussion on rollout, regulation and, above all, safety.
It featured independent road safety campaigner and trustee of Brake, Meera Naran MBE, self-driving expert and Chief Road Safety Adviser to National Highways, Dr Nick Reed, and senior representatives of Oxa including Autonomy Systems and Regulatory Expert, Bryn Balcombe, Director of Safety Assurance, Camilla Fowler, Head of Global Regulatory Affairs, Jamie Hodsdon, and co-founder and CTO, Professor Paul Newman.
To set the scene, numerous messages from friends ahead of the event referred to the likelihood of a crash on the demo – a timely reminder of the consumer confidence challenge. And here we had leading proponents of self-driving in the same room as someone who’s young son, Dev, was killed in a collision with a lorry on a smart motorway.
Naran, having also just had her first ever trip in a self-driving car, explained that Dev was passionate about technology, and cars in particular. “I see value in the potential of self-driving,” she said. “It means that, in 20 years’ time, my daughter, who is four, is going to be safer.” It wasn’t an average discussion. It was no holds barred…
Self-driving safety
PN: “We specialise in self-driving software – providing it to others, like the Beep shuttles in Florida – but we also run a small fleet of vehicles to prove our work in different environments.
“We think it is much smarter to assure a certain vehicle for a particular route, say the Number 7 bus, rather than claiming ‘We can drive everywhere’. From nowhere to everywhere overnight? That sounds like a stretch. Autonomy should run first where it fits best, and you get to ‘everywhere’ by doing lots of ‘somewheres’.
“Be open; admit that sometimes the technology will get it wrong, and design it to fail safely. Incidents like we saw with Cruise in San Francisco last year deserve transparency, an honest explanation. That’s why we have Oxa YellowBird, our canary in the autonomy coal mine, which independently monitors Oxa Driver to ensure driving remains careful and competent at all times.
“YellowBird is all about explainability of Oxa Driver behaviour and is designed to support the AV Act requirement for in-use monitoring. The key question is: What data do you need to share with others to prove your vehicle is operating safely?
“There’s no intellectual property (IP) in the YellowBird output, but we will happily share data to demonstrate how and why events unfolded in a certain way. That has to be the price of entry to operate in this space. The safety bar has to be high. That’s what the public expect.”
NR: “Self-driving cars must be at least as safe as a good human driver, that’s enshrined in the AV Act, so we need a mechanism to hold them to account.”
Careful & Competent
CF: “The term ‘careful and competent’ has appeared in Road Safety Acts since the 1980s. There is some case law, but it has always been hugely subjective. Now, thanks to Labour and peer amendments ensuring its inclusion in the AV Act, we get to define what ‘careful and competent’ actually means for self-driving vehicles. This could deliver a step-change in road safety.”
JH: “Road safety is a global issue, but number of fatalities alone feels like a very blunt metric. The public expect AVs to be careful and competent, but what data do regulators need to demonstrate that? For example, the Highway Code says cars overtaking cyclists should leave a 1.5m gap, but sometimes it might be essential for the vehicle to breach that to avoid a collision. However, in those cases, it must provide data to explain why it made that decision and that’s what YellowBird is for.”
BB: “In-use monitoring brings so many benefits. Not just blackbox recordings for crash investigation, as we see in aviation, but also for detecting and learning from near-miss events. As automotive transitions from a product industry to a service industry it’s clear that approval tests for the product safety will need to be supplemented with continual in-use monitoring for service safety – to ensure incidents that require grounding of a fleet can be detected and safety issues resolved before service resumes.”
MN: “I am encouraged by the focus on safety, and only using this for routes from A to B, as opposed to everywhere, sounds very sensible.”
PN: “That’s made my day. We call it route qualification. The other keys are transparency and explainability. When a fault occurs, you must provide evidence and demonstrate how you have fixed it.”
Oxa continue to make the case for increased mandatory data sharing to the UK government and at UNECE level. The fact they were so open with a journalist, an academic and a road safety campaigner speaks volumes.
E-Transit Minibus
As an added bonus, the last few hours of the day of were spent at nearby Culham Science Centre, part of the CCAV, Innovate and Zenzic-backed CAM Testbed UK network, and home to the Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) test facility.
There, we were given exclusive first sight of Oxa’s new E-Transit Minibus. With a background in motorsport engineering, project lead Holly Watson Nall explained that Oxa will operate the new service, as well as providing the vehicles, on a soon-to-be announced route covering both public and private roads.
“In the UK?” we asked, several times. Oxa would neither confirm nor deny, but it is right-hand drive so…
