Ives Equipment in King of Prussia provided the venue for our December 3rd monthly meeting, which was attended by about 25. Rahul Mangharam, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke on the safety of autonomous vehicles. His Powerpoint initially provided videos of driverless car crashes taken by dashboard cameras. Making these vehicles safe, he said, is complicated. Today we essentially have enhanced cruise control. He talked about some of the numerous ways things can go wrong. Examples include conditions like rain, snow, black ice, and fog as well as aggressive human drivers.

Mangharam said that a great deal of data needs to be accumulated to determine when autonomous vehicles become safer than the average driver–probably more than 100 million miles of experience. Ways to increase safety include:

• Smart roads and infrastructure
• traffic modelling
• 5G cellular so vehicles can communicate with one another
• virtual world traffic simulators
• radar and lidar (light detection and ranging)
• scaled-down autonomous vehicle racing competitions.

Eventually, he said, we’ll have to develop and continually improve tests to provide certification of autonomous vehicle safety.