Autonomous Truck Crash Draws FMCSA, NHTSA Attention
An April 6 crash involving a truck being operated by TuSimple’s autonomous technology crashed into a concrete jersey barrier along a crowded stretch of interstate in Arizona. The TuSimple truck was the only vehicle involved in the crash.
TuSimple said the crash was caused by an error of the human operators inside the cab at the time.
“A human error occurred when two operators in a TuSimple vehicle incorrectly reengaged the autonomous driving mode without completing all of the steps necessary to safely reengage, resulting in the truck scraping a median,” the company said. “Fortunately, no one was injured, there was no property damage, and the only visible sign of the incident was a minor scrape on the truck.”
Crash Under Review
The company noted that in seven years and 7.2 million miles of autonomous vehicle testing, this was the first on-road incident for which TuSimple has been responsible.
A Wall Street Journal report of the crash and TuSimple’s safety cited researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, who said blaming the crash on operator error was misleading because it was the autonomous system that turned the wheel. The researchers added that common safeguards in the autonomous system would have prevented the incident from occurring.
TuSimple co-founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou said during the company’s second quarter earnings call earlier this month that the company’s track record of one accident in seven years of operation is proof that the system is safe.
The company said immediately following the crash, it grounded its autonomous fleet and launched an independent review to determine what caused the incident. Following the review, TuSimple said it “upgraded all of our systems with new automated system checks to prevent this kind of human error from ever happening again.”
The company also reported the crash to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Arizona Department of Transportation.
After self-reporting the crash, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration formally requested information, and TuSimple said it welcomed teams from FMCSA and NHTSA to its Tucson headquarters “to discuss what occurred and the solutions we put in place to safeguard against human errors. Currently, we are helping FMCSA and NHTSA with the review process.”
Original article via: Overdrive
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