[SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???

Peter Bernard Ladkin ladkin at rvs.uni-bielefeld.de
Thu Jul 21 07:50:33 CEST 2016


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-%20Boeing%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





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 455 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/private/systemsafety/attachments/20160721/a24b5a92/attachment.pgp>


More information about the systemsafety mailing list