Open-Sourcing Our Approach to Autonomous Safety
Safety procedures, materials, and test code for the next generation of autonomous vehicles
Open Autonomous Safety
At Voyage, we live and breathe safety every single day. We understand the magnitude of the responsibility we have each time a Voyage autonomous vehicle is on the roadway with the public.
Safety comes first in every decision Voyage makes. We are excited to double down on that commitment by launching the first version of the Open Autonomous Safety initiative. OAS is a fully open-source library of Voyage’s internal safety procedures, materials and test code designed to supplement existing safety programs at autonomous vehicle startups across the world. This alpha release is designed to grow extensively in the coming months. Our aim is to cement OAS as a foundational safety resource in the industry.
When it comes to safety, we believe open is better. At Voyage, we welcome contributions to improve OAS, like any other open source project. The purpose of this effort is to promote an elevated standard of safety in the autonomous vehicle industry, increasing public trust through transparency.
OAS is the first in a series of safety-related open source releases from our amazing Voyage Operations team. With so many new autonomous vehicle startups defining safety processes from the ground up, we believe releasing something today is important. We cannot wait to see OAS grow into a comprehensive library of content that becomes the gold-standard for safely testing autonomous vehicles.
What is Covered?
We design our products with the fundamental principle that Voyage vehicles will soon be operating in a truly driverless world, and that safety is of even greater importance when there is no human behind the wheel. In an increasingly driverless world, comprehensive safety frameworks like OAS become essential.
This initial release of OAS focuses on five key areas. We believe that these areas represent the core of any autonomous vehicle safety program:
- Scenario Testing
- Functional Safety
- Fault Injection Testing (coming soon!)
- Autonomy Assessment
- Testing Toolkit
Scenario Testing
We are releasing an extensive list of custom-built scenarios, designed to evaluate the real-world capabilities of autonomous technology. These scenarios are designed for suburban environments, but we welcome additional contributions of scenarios for high-speed, urban, and other unique surroundings.
These scenarios represent fundamental questions: How should an autonomous vehicle behave when it reaches a crosswalk and a pedestrian approaches from the right? Or when another car is backing out of a driveway? These scenarios, and many more, provide a rubric for assessing the practical capabilities of an autonomous vehicle while on the road. The scenarios also introduce a qualitative dimension to our safety program. We don’t just ask if one of our vehicles can complete a scenario, but also how well it performs.
Learn more about our approach to creation of scenarios and browse our alpha library of scenarios
Functional Safety
How can we ensure that functional safety standards in autonomous vehicles are being met to ensure the safety of passengers and the general public?
Without a driver to help identify and mitigate failures, autonomous vehicle systems need incredibly robust safety requirements and an equally comprehensive and well-defined process for analyzing risks and assessing capabilities. Voyage models its safety approach after the ISO 26262 standard for automotive safety, taking the best practices from the automotive industry and applying them to autonomous technology. The automotive industry continues to reach for new levels of safety in manufacturing vehicles, and we are inspired by that approach.
Learn more about how we define requirements and assess risk in our Functional Safety documentation
Fault Injection Testing
Evaluating an autonomous vehicle’s ability to respond to rare system errors is difficult, especially if those errors only happen once every ten thousand miles. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing the code and tools that enable our developers to programmatically trigger failures in both the hardware and software of critical autonomy components. Think of it as an equivalent of Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, but for autonomous vehicles.
How does your system handle a sensor unit that starts malfunctioning after thousands of hours of usage? Fault Injection Testing enables you to understand your vehicle’s response, and design redundancies to handle such cases gracefully.
Autonomy Assessment
Autonomous technologies often result in incredibly complex systems, involving compute, sensors, custom hardware, and software. One modification can simultaneously impact a host of critical components. Simply put: it can be really hard to know if you are moving forward or backward.
We are opening up our documentation on how Voyage validates that it is moving in the right direction, and how we know that we are solving the right problems. We look at data every single day, and use consistent, well-formed metrics to objectively track progress across an ever-evolving system.
Learn more about how Voyage measures progress, and how you can too
Testing Toolkit
Communicating an idea for a complex test scenario can be tricky. We have made it simple with our open-source Sketch library of traffic, roadway and vehicle assets. Drag-and-drop assets into Keynote or Google Slides, and brainstorm away with a colleague on how to stress-test your autonomous vehicle!
Speaking a consistent language across our scenario library has enabled faster iteration, improved test coverage, and higher repeatability in our Operations testing practices.
Why Did We Release This?
If any startup were to build their own Linux-equivalent today, it would be riddled with security flaws and bugs. Time and a world-class open source community have ensured that Linux is one of the most battle-hardened products out there. We believe that the procedures, materials and test code to validate the safety of a 2-ton autonomous vehicle should be just as (if not more!) battle-hardened. This is why we are releasing OAS.
One of the magical things about working at Voyage is the freedom to question traditional approaches to problems. This value has contributed to an amazing team culture. When our world-class Operations team approached me with the idea of open sourcing our safety practices, something which everyone else has kept close to their chests, I was so excited for what it could mean for the industry. What’s better, the team has executed amazingly on OAS, and I know our future releases will be of that same high-quality.
We are excited to collaborate on this initiative with industry authorities, startups, and autonomous safety enthusiasts world-wide. Join us!
Would you like to contribute to OAS from within Voyage by joining our Operations or Engineering teams? We’d love to meet you to discuss a role at Voyage.
