Dr. Gill Pratt is now the Chief Executive Officer of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a research and development enterprise designed to bridge the gap between fundamental research and product development. He was previously at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he planned and designed the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
In his plenary talk, “A Billion Vehicles, Ten Trillion miles – The Reliability Challenges of Autonomous Driving,” Gill Pratt spoke about the need to create a car that could reduce the number of fatalities caused by car accidents. Driverless cars may be the solution, but he stressed the difficulty of creating a reliable autonomous car. The reason They would have to beat humans and humans are remarkably safe drivers. Currently, (non-drunk, non-drowsy, non-distracted) human driven cars cause 1 fatality per billion miles – an astonishing feat. Still, roughly 1 million deaths are caused by traffic accidents and a high proportion of that is young people. “As a community in robotics,” he emphasizes, “we need to fix this problem.” Dr. Pratt called this endeavor “a wonderful aspiration,” but stressed its difficulty.
For one thing, autonomous vehicles cannot be test-driven enough miles to demonstrate their safety, and, as such, alternative testing methods such as simulations are needed. According to Dr. Pratt, autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety, according to a new RAND report. And, despite the millions of miles and hundreds of millions of miles test driven by Google and Tesla, respectively, these are likely selection based miles and likely not representative. In other words, most driving is easy, but some driving is difficult and, “we can’t test enough hard driving,” Dr. Pratt emphasized. Some of this is resolved at TRI with simulations. (Simulations must be validated, so they accurately reflect reality, he points out.)
In terms of humans and robots working together, TRI has relied on a “guardian system,” where the human and machine work together. At TRI, the goal is “to make a car that won’t crash no matter how bad of a driver you are.”
IROS 2016 is currently being held in Daejeon, Korea at the Daejeon Convention Center (DCC).
