Disruption that makes autonomous driving level 5 possible : SafetyNex technology

Disruption that makes autonomous driving level 5 possible : SafetyNex technology

Most consultant and experts on automotive prospection tend to postpone the arrival of full autonomous driving. Their method is simple : they consider the current level 3 autonomous systems, and they estimate the number of examples in a database and the number of operation calculation should be done to improve the level 3 and cover "every" use cases.

But this method is wrong.

Indeed, the current AD Systems can be described as a chain as follow :
Perception -> Fusion -> Understanding -> Decision Making -> Action

One can notive that this chain is a feedforward one : no feedback, no loop. But every engineer knows that when it is about robustness and automatic adaptation to unknown situations, feedback loops are needed.

So it is NOT relevant to estimate the needs of potential level 5 as an extension of level 3. The paradigm must change.

And this is what a French company has proposd with their technology SafetyNex : this technology computes at each moment (several times per second) the driving risk that the driver is currently taking. If the driver is a human being, then it is possible to send an alert when risk rises a little too much, letting time to slow down smoothly and stay in the normal driving mode (trying never to b in emergency situation). If driver is a AD system, then it is possible to make it automatically adaptive to driving risk with the following scheme :

Then AD system can react "well" to unknown situations.

This technology is currently under deployment by tier one companies with the help of NEXYAD