Safety Blind Spot in Remote Driving: Considerations for Risk Assessment of Connection Loss Fallback Strategies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the safety risks of fallback strategies in remote driving, revealing that immediate braking upon connection loss can cause high collision rates, especially in urban environments, highlighting a safety blind spot.

Contribution

It presents simulation-based evidence of collision risks associated with fallback strategies and discusses their implications for safety analysis in remote vehicle control.

Findings

High collision probability with immediate standstill fallback in urban scenarios

Severe rear-end collision risks demonstrated with large commercial vehicles

Falling safety blind spot identified in current fallback strategy assessments

Abstract

As part of the overall goal of driverless road vehicles, remote driving is a major emerging field of research of its own. Current remote driving concepts for public road traffic often establish a fallback strategy of immediate braking to a standstill in the event of a connection loss. This may seem like the most logical option when human control of the vehicle is lost. However, our simulation results from hundreds of scenarios based on naturalistic traffic scenes indicate high collision rates for any immediate substantial deceleration to a standstill in urban settings. We show that such a fallback strategy can result in a SOTIF relevant hazard, making it questionable whether such a design decision can be considered acceptable. Therefore, from a safety perspective, we would call this problem a safety blind spot, as safety analyses in this regard seem to be very rare. In this article, we first present a simulation on a naturalistic dataset that shows a high probability of collision in the described case. Second, we discuss the severity of the resulting potential rear-end collisions and provide an even more severe example by including a large commercial vehicle in the potential collision.