In 2019, industry is in the testing stages of level 4 SAE/NHTSA automated vehicles. While in testing, L4 vehicles require a safety driver to monitor the driving task at all times. These specially trained drivers must take back control if the vehicle doesn’t seem to be responding correctly to the ever-changing roadway and environment. Research suggests that monitoring the driving task can lead to a decrease in vigilance over time. Recently, Waymo publicly released takeover request and mileage data on its 2018 L4 autonomous vehicle takeover requests. From this data, which was represented in mileage, we created temporal metric which showed that there were typically 150-250 hours without a takeover request. From this we suggest that there may be a decrement in vigilance for Waymo safety drivers. While there are still many unknowns, we suggest Waymo release takeover requests in terms of time rather than mileage and provide more information on the operational design domains of these vehicles. Expanding the content of this publicly-released data could then give researchers and the public more understanding of the conditions under which safety drivers are functioning.
With more unmanned aircraft (UA) becoming airborne each day, an already high manned aircraft to UA exposure rate continues to grow. Pilots and rulemaking authorities realize that UA visibility is a real, but unquantified, threat to operations under the see-and-avoid concept. To finally quantify the threat, a novel contrast-based UA visibility model is constructed here using collected empirical data as well as previous work on the factors affecting visibility. This work showed that UA visibility less than 1300 m makes a mid-air collision a serious threat if a manned aircraft and a UA are on a collision course while operating under the see-and-avoid concept. Similarly, this work also showed that a mid-air collision may be unavoidable when UA visibility is less than 400 m. Validating pilot and rulemaking authority concerns, this work demonstrated that UA visibility distances less than 1300 m and 400 m occur often in the real world. Finally, the model produced UA visibility lookup tables that may prove useful to rulemaking authorities such as the FAA and ICAO for future work in the proof of equivalency of detect and avoid operations. Until then, pilots flying at slower airspeeds in the vicinity of UA may improve safety margins.
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