Validation of Autonomous Mobile Systems: Experiences and Challenges

Introduction
Location
Previsional program
Organization
Contact

Introduction

The workshop is postponed to a later date. We will keep you up to date.

Mobility is undergoing a major transformation driven by societal needs and technology. There is the need to provide accessibility, to reduce traffic congestion & pollution and to ensure safety whilst keeping our industry competitive. Progress in sensing, algorithms for perception, decision-making, and computing power together with machine learning methods are enabling the deployment of autonomous systems capable to interact with the complexities of public environments. They can be considered as extensions of human capabilities in multiple domains like mobility systems.

Over the past years we have witnessed an increasing interest on the deployment of land, sea and air autonomous mobility applications demonstrating their potential. Multiple demonstrations and prototypes have been showed with different autonomous capabilities. However, mobile autonomous systems with high levels of autonomy are few, most of them are operating under very constrained conditions or rely on specialist operators for safety assurance.

For autonomous mobility systems to operate in public spaced and be accepted by society they need to demonstrate their safety assurance and trust to all stakeholders. Experience has shown that there could be a very large number of scenarios that these systems need to address even in well-defined operational design domains. Extensive testing in real conditions whilst enabling much progress, it is unlikely to address the outliers (edge cases). These are difficult to find and to replicate, but most of all, it can result on finding hazardous conditions that might result on severe societal questioning on this emergent technology.

Much work has been done in industry and academia towards demonstrating this assurance in this cross-domain as we strive to deploy autonomous mobility systems in public spaces independent of human control. The purpose of this workshop is to gather leading scientists and experts in this domain to convey their vision and experience across practitioners and scientists working in related domains. It is our purpose to combine different points of view so as to enrich the knowledge of this emergent community so as to be aware of the scientific methods available and to have feedback from industry on their deployment experience.