The Miracle of Coincident Removal of “Safety Drivers” or Reaching L4 Autonomy
By: Michael Dekort
Tags: Autonomous Cars, Mobility, Driverless Cars

Wow!!!!!!!!!! So many companies getting rid of “safety drivers” and attaining SAE L4 withing a couple months of each other. More will come soon as the hype and desperation domino tumbling picks up speed, especially avoidable tragedies with the loss of in vehicle safety drivers. (They should not exist at all. Having said this, they are far better off in the vehicle since remote ops adds significant latency.)

· L4 and Removed Safety Drivers — Waymo, Cruise, Yandex, Gatik

· Removed Safety Drivers — Motional, AutoX, Baidu

· Zoox and Voyage appear to pop any day now

Of course, NONE of them provides any significant proof of their capabilities. You know why Tesla, Uber and Lyft can’t say they have something they don’t? They don’t use employees as Guinea pigs they can control. Tesla uses its customers and the rideshare folks would not be able to silence their customers. This funding pump will not make it through the new year.

More in my articles here

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-autonomous-vehicle-industry-can-be-saved-by-doing-the-opposite-of-what-is-being-done-now-b4e5c6ae9237

Remote Control for Autonomous Vehicles — A far worse idea than the use of Public “Safety” Driving

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/remote-control-for-autonomous-vehicles-a-far-worse-idea-than-the-use-of-public-shadow-safety-df2ad64772c6

Be Wary of Waymo’s New Safety Record and Brad Templeton’s Declaration the System is Superhuman and should be Deployed Today

· https://imispgh.medium.com/be-wary-of-waymos-new-safety-record-and-brad-templeton-s-declaration-the-system-is-superhuman-and-ea59f5739567

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — Simulation’s Next Generation (featuring Dactle)

· https://www.sae.org/news/2020/08/new-gen-av-simulation

Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Self-Inflicted and Avoidable Collapse — Ongoing Update

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/i-predicted-this-a-year-and-a-half-ago-1b47bf098b03

Proposal for Successfully Creating an Autonomous Ground or Air Vehicle

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/proposal-for-successfully-creating-an-autonomous-ground-or-air-vehicle-539bb10967b1

Simulation can create a Complete Digital Twin of the Real World if DoD/Aerospace Technology is used

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/simulation-can-create-a-complete-digital-twin-of-the-real-world-if-dod-aerospace-technology-is-used-c79a64551647

Simulation Photorealism is almost Irrelevant for Autonomous Vehicle Development and Testing

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/simulation-photorealism-is-almost-irrelevant-for-autonomous-vehicle-development-and-testing-136871dee440

Autonomous Vehicles Need to Have Accidents to Develop this Technology

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/autonomous-vehicles-need-to-have-accidents-to-develop-this-technology-2cc034abac9b

Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for AV Development — NONSENSE

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/using-the-real-world-is-better-than-proper-simulation-for-autonomous-vehicle-development-nonsense-90cde4ccc0ce

The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-hype-of-geofencing-for-autonomous-vehicles-bd964cb14d16

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — End Public Shadow/Safety Driving

· https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sae/ave_201901/index.php

My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.

Key Industry Participation

- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)

- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts

My company is Dactle

We are building an aerospace/DoD/FAA level D, full L4/5 simulation-based testing and AI system with an end-state scenario matrix to address several of the critical issues in the AV/OEM industry I mentioned in my articles below. This includes replacing 99.9% of public shadow and safety driving. As well as dealing with significant real-time, model fidelity and loading/scaling issues caused by using gaming engines and other architectures. (Issues Unity will confirm. We are now working together. We are also working with UAV companies). If not remedied these issues will lead to false confidence and performance differences between what the Plan believes will happen and what actually happens. If someone would like to see a demo or discuss this further please let me know.