Philip Koopman

Philip Koopman of Carnegie Mellon University is an internationally recognized expert on autonomous vehicle (AV) safety, whose work in that area spans almost 30 years. He has also worked extensively in more general embedded system design, software quality and safety across numerous transportation, industrial and defense application domains, including conventional automotive software and hardware systems. He originated the UL 4600 autonomous vehicle safety standard, and received the Industry Legend award at the 2024 the Self-Driving Industry Awards.

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Presentation

Understanding self-driving vehicle safety

Removing the human driver fundamentally changes what we actually mean by acceptable safety. A simplistic 'safer than human driver' positive risk balance approach must be augmented with additional considerations regarding risk transfer, negligent driving behavior, standards conformance, absence of unreasonable fine-grain risk, ethics and equity concerns. Current standards frameworks and accompanying definitions are likely to be inadequate to ensure safety due to implicit assumptions that are violated when the human driver is removed. A framework relates risk to acceptable safety in a way that is applicable to all autonomous systems.