Mitigating Catastrophic Failure at Intersections of Autonomous Vehicles (Short Paper)

Fully autonomous vehicles promise enormous gains in safety, efficiency, and economy. Before such gains can be realized, safety and reliability concerns must be addressed. We have previously introduced a system for managing such vehicles at intersections that is capable of handling more vehicles and causing fewer delays than traffic lights and stop signs [2]. While the system is safe under normal operating conditions, we have not discussed the possibility or implications of unforeseen mechanical failures. Because the system orchestrates such precarious “close calls” the tolerance for such errors is small. In this paper, we introduce safety features of the system designed to deal with these types of failures, and perform a basic failure mode analysis, demonstrating that without these features, the system is unsuitable for deployment due to a propensity for catastrophic failure modes.