[SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???

Fri Jul 22 13:54:28 CEST 2016

Morning Les,

These are all on the surface reasonable ideas, however as Mencken said; "for
every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"
(sorry - couldn't help myself ;-).

1. The solutions suggested are applicable only to vehicles; what about
pedestrians, cyclists, horses, live stock, wild animals (deer or moose) or
any of the hundreds of objects that can be found on roads e.g. roadwork's,
fallen trees. To go beyond where Mercedes, BMW and Tesla are now requires
everything be detected.

2. They don't scale, or at least don't scale fast enough.
First, to be truly useful all vehicles would need to be equipped. Currently
there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the worlds roads and approximately 85
million new vehicles being added each year. Note this doesn't include road
going equipment such mobile plant or tractors.

Second the average life of a vehicle is somewhere between 10 and 20 years so
even if we started mandating one of these solutions now it would be 2026 or
so before approximately half of the world vehicles were equipped and 2040
before 100% (simple model assuming 3% of all vehicles are removed each
year).

Even if it was a simple retrofit like putting bumper stickers on the front
sides and rear of every vehicle it still need to be designed and rolled out.
If it has to be done by a mechanic paid for by the manufactures it's going
to have a minimum cost of $50 US per vehicle... so we're talking a minimum
of $50 billion... And if it's bumper sticks they had better be an exact
match to the paint on my car!

But that would be unlikely to happen as,

3. The solution would have to be legally mandated. This might be possible
Europe but in the US you would have to provide an economic case that showed
that the avoided cost in lives saved would exceed the cost of adding the
equipment to all vehicles. Three simple examples, in Europe side impact bars
on trucks, ABS and indicators a different colour to brake lights are all
required, in the US none of these are as the economic case isn't clear
enough for to allow the rule making process to move forward.

For the Tesla that implies you need agreement between the EU, USA/Canada,
China and Australia (based on locations of the supercharger networks).
Goodness know how long getting agreement would take but possibly somewhere
between 4 and 10 years?

I know this is a bit like pissing on the parade but the huge numbers, time
scales and politics involved make the problem approximate intractable fairly
well, which is why manufactures are following an approach based on what they
control.

It may be worthwhile to note that the vast majority of cars on the road
today don't need radar reflectors as they are radar reflectors, under all
that plastic they are steel (or aluminium in the case of Tesla). It gets
interesting with carbon fibre cars such as the BMW i3 but I assume they have
radar reflective material added to the mix as radar and adaptive cruise
control is so common today (you would hope that would come out of the hazard
analysis wouldn't you).

Remember in the Tesla crash the car's radar "saw" the truck (but only the
truck bed) but apparently misclassified what it was seeing... at this
juncture it appears to be a requirements or analysis problem not a senor
detection problem.

I suspect that fully autonomous cars are probably some way off, Google is
now saying 5 to 10 years, Musk says two but what he probably means is 4 to
10.

Fully autonomous vehicles can probably be classed as a "wicked" problem, in
that the problem itself isn't well defined. Tesla and other manufactures
have been able to provide a partial solution for highly constrained
conditions, i.e. motorways and highways where the complexity of the
situation is relatively  "low". Noisy urban areas (as an example) is a whole
different problem. For example do we have to detect people and classify them
as people or is it enough to classify them as things either moving or not
moving; or perhaps as thing on road, things moving towards road or things
not on road? At this point in time it may not be possible to answer that
question.

Cheers.

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety
[mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of
Les Chambers
Sent: 22 July 2016 00:14
To: 'Peter Bernard Ladkin'; systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???

Peter
The concept of workshopping something is that you rollout ideas, people
critique them and in the process maybe you spark some creativity, new ideas
that is. These days our lives are absolutely ruled by the people with ideas.
Elon Musk is a classic example (I'm in awe of that guy despite the fact I
disagree with some of the things he does). Ideas are the last frontier, they
are the final currency, they will never be automated.
In 24 hours My Tesla Motor Club post attracted 930 views and 22 replies. It
looks like this is a very active forum biased more towards solutions than
the it'll-never-work-narrative - I find this refreshing.
The following three I found particularly informative:
----response one ------------------
Good reference: Wireless Vehicular Networks for Car Collision Avoidance
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781441995629
----- response two -------------------
I'd favour a "radar reflector" of some sort - something that makes a
"vehicle" more "visible" to the sensors. Hopefully dirt-cheap, and thus
could be mandated for installation at the vehicle's next roadworth-test
(over here that is an annual test once a car reaches 3 year's old).
------ response three ------------------ "high-quality GPS SPS receivers
provide better than 3.5 meter horizontal accuracy."
So i think accuracy is not good enough.
If there is a car on the side of the road, your GPS receivers are closer
each other than 3.5 m and collision warning would give false alert.
------------------------

Have you got any ideas Peter?

Les

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety
[mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of
Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 3:51 PM
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???

Les,

On 2016-07-21 01:44 , Les Chambers wrote:
> Ok, so I've posted my brilliant idea (below) on a Tesla Forum for the 
> Model S. .... It got 4 views in the first 10 seconds after posting.
> Let's see how much interest it generates.

When I read your post I thought you were being facetious. But on the odd
chance you were being serious, a couple of comments.

First, fail-stop is a fairly well-understood mechanism, of limited use. It
is going to be of particularly limited use in road traffic, not only because
of its functional limitations but also because of the latency. People's
reaction time is between 1 and 2 seconds (this has been fairly well measured
with pilots). This is quite long enough to get you into an irrecoverable
situation in road traffic.

Second, the Tesla S is equipped with such a device. It's called "steering
wheel and brake activation" and it didn't save Mr. Brown.

Third, designing reliable GPS locator mechanisms, even for steadily-moving
objects, is tricky. For example,
http://www.icao.int/APAC/Meetings/2015%20ADSBSITF14/IP04_AUS%20AI.4%20-%20Bo
eing%20787%20ADS-B%20deficiency.pdf
For general comments about the suitability of GPS-based devices for
high-resolution terrestrial use, see
http://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/global-navigation-space-systems
, the report of a Working Group chaired by Martyn. There is quite a bit
about trustworthiness and lack of it.

Fourth, car manufacturers have been working on such "sense and avoid"
mechanisms quite intensely for well over a decade. I recall a talk at
SAFECOMP 2004 in Potsdam from Daimler R&D guru Ralf Herrtwich on the
trustworthiness of automotive telematics. He was talking about car-to-car
stuff. It was mostly radar/lidar/sonar based, for what I take to be obvious
reasons, namely that you don't have to worry in quite the same way about the
trustworthiness of your sensorics as you do about the trustworthiness of
third-party information such as GPS positioning of others. I doubt if that
has changed at all.

I asked him about what they were doing about vulnerable road users and
didn't get the impression that they were doing much at all at that point.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany MoreInCommon Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de

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