142: Dr Phillip Koopman of Edge Case Research On Safety Engineering For Autonomous Vehicles

Summary: As countless dead-end demos have proven, building the features and functionality of an autonomous drive system is far easier than creating a system that can reliably keep passengers safe in the chaos of a modern roadway. Dr Phillip Koopman of Edge Case Research spends his days looking at all of the potential safety challenges inherent to autonomous drive systems and is developing UL4600 as a framework through which AV developers can demonstrate the safety engineering and validation that their systems have gone through, as an AV-specific compliment to functional standards like ISO26262 and ISO21448 (SOTIF). On this week's show, Dr Koopman argues that some in the AV space still don't take safety seriously enough, explains how UL4600 can raise the safety bar for the entire sector, the unique challenges of the end-to-end deep learning approach and much more.