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Invited Speaker: How Duty of Care Defines Society’s Top-Level Safety Requirement for Automated Vehicles

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 11, 2023: 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Chris Gerdes 

Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus, Stanford University

Presentation Description

Discussions of automated vehicle safety often revolve around the question, "How Safe is Safe Enough?" This talk argues that society has already answered this question in terms of the social contract placed on human drivers. In the US, this contract centers around the concept of Duty of Care, which requires drivers act reasonably, maintain a lookout and control vehicle speed and motion. By adopting Duty of Care as the top-level safety goal in AV design, developers can systematically engineer cars that meet societal expectations for mobility while improving safety. While this does require translating concepts of reasonableness into engineering terms, a simple model facilitates this translation while leaving some freedom for variation across developers.

Speaker Biography

Chris Gerdes is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. His laboratory studies how cars move, how humans drive cars and how to design future cars that work cooperatively with the driver or drive themselves. Vehicles in the lab include X1, an entirely student-built test vehicle; Niki, an automated Volkswagen GTI that can lap a racetrack as quickly as an expert driver; and MARTY, an electrified DeLorean capable of controlled drifts. Chris and his team have been recognized with a number of awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Ralph Teetor award from SAE International and the Rudolf Kalman Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

From February 2016 to January 2017, Chris served as the first Chief Innovation Officer at the United States Department of Transportation. He was part of the team that developed the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy and represented the Department on the National Science and Technology Committee Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Chris was a co-founder of truck platooning company Peloton Technology and served as Peloton’s Principal Scientist before joining U.S. DOT.

Presentation File