Speaker: Mathieu Joerger, AME
Title: Multisensory Safety Monitoring for Autonomous Vehicles
Abstract:
Summary
Autonomous vehicles carry the promise of safe, fuel-efficient, and time-efficient mobility for all. These benefits are predicated on autonomous navigation systems achieving unprecedented levels of safety. Substantial resources have been deployed over the past 30 years in civilian aviation to meet limits of acceptability on positioning errors, or ‘alerts limits’, of 10 m to 35 m with high probability (on the order of 1-10-9). In comparison, alert limits for self-driving cars will range from 0.5 m to 1 m, which will only be achievable using new multisensory systems.
This presentation describes the design, analysis and evaluation of new methods to quantify navigation and collision detection safety for autonomous vehicles. The first part of the talk provides an overview of Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (ARAIM), a cooperative research effort by the European Union and the United States to analyze future Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Research contributions include, for example, the design of optimal estimators, which specifically minimize safety risk rather than maximizing accuracy. The second part of the talk investigates whether analytical safety methods used in aviation can be leveraged for navigation and collision warning in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV). Self-driving cars caused fatal accidents, including the May 2016 crash of a Tesla Model S in Florida, and the 2018 collision of an autonomous Uber CAV with a pedestrian in Arizona. A new method is introduced for quantifying risks in data association, a process aimed at matching sensor measurements with mapped landmarks, which is needed for laser and radar localization.
Biography
Dr. Mathieu Joerger obtained a ‘Diplôme d’Ingénieur’ (2002) from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Industries de Strasbourg, in France, and an M.S. (2002) and Ph.D. (2009) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is the 2009 recipient of the Institute of Navigation (ION)’s Bradford Parkinson award, and the 2014 recipient of the ION’s Early Achievement Award. He is the technical editor of Navigation for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. Dr. Joerger is currently assistant professor at the University of Arizona, working on multi-constellation Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (ARAIM) for civilian aviation applications, on multi-sensor integration for ground vehicle navigation, and on trajectory tracking risk evaluation for space debris.