Autonomous Vehicles: Effective Policy Creation

AV Policy Creation – Three Considerations

Scott Hoselton, President of ACS, joined representatives from Uber and Waymo at a mid-January assembly of the State of Wisconsin’s Steering Committee discussing the topic of Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Testing and Deployment. The perspective he offered came from the company’s 24-year history of working with regulations in transportation product development and validation.

Hoselton drew parallels between today’s challenges and opportunities with autonomous vehicles and the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment which set in motion the emissions regulations which care still being implemented today. To this group, Scott suggested that, “As industry standards are developed, regulatory agencies need to align at a pace that allows the market to develop in a financially viable model, but not at the expense of the expected outcomes – in this case, public safety.”

As the vision advances, the relationship between technology development, market demand, and regulatory requirements is critical for the successful product development and implementation of autonomous vehicles.

Good policy centers around these three legs. If any of these components progress at the expense of the other, this creates potential for a failure in the policy.

With advancement in technology and the transition from development to production, as consumer confidence and interest continues to grow, there are three primary considerations that will help achieve The public needs a policy that fosters continued innovation and development while ensuring consumers are informed and safe as passengers and pedestrians.

1. Operational Readiness – infrastructure across all platforms needs to be integrated, consistent and standard. Integrating infrastructure includes the development and validation of the testing chain. As we move from algorithms to laboratories to the highway, the test technology, the vehicle itself and the environment needs to be evaluated and validated as a system.

2. Tolerance – Tools to validate AV products need to be tried, tested, available, and operational for validation. A few examples that represent the need to have mature technology tools in place include: Durability & Robustness Validation includes accelerated cycling, physical environment simulation, and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) test requirements. Data requirements must be developed and confirmed.

The addition of V2X communication yields significant increase in complexity (ex. Vehicle to x = cars, infrastructure, people, mobile devices), increases the need for uniform test methodologies to assure all systems and sensors are validated for interoperability and compatibility.

The vehicle is outfitted with hundreds of sensors and will drive the need to address how the whole system interacts. Suppliers often test their product per their own test and development methodologies and then provide their product to subsystem suppliers. The subsystem will need to be tested again as an integrated system or when all the subsystems are assembled.

3. Access – the greater marketplace must be engaged and have access.

Allowing the marketplace access to the discussion brings real world subject matter expertise and the ability to deploy technologies in a cost effective and timely manner. This will impact the interpretation and translation of regulations. It will provide resources for the proper execution of test facility integration, according to these standards with similar impact on test equipment, and will provide input into ways and means of test research and development.

It is our position that AV technology will reach market acceptance when policy requires test and validation of the newly designed integrated systems to a common standard, and when these regulations, from a vision to a product, are able to be executed within a financially stable business model.