Gatik AI is partnering with Edge Case Research and TÜV SÜD to assess the company’s safety case for its freight-only operations. Edge Case Research is an autonomy risk management provider, while TÜV SÜD is an independent testing, inspection, and certification company. Together, the companies are meant to confirm that Gatik’s safety case meets the requirements of UL4600, the current safety standard for autonomous vehicles.
"The assessment of our safety case goes beyond a basic review of safety practices and mission statements," said Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO. "We are assessing our complete autonomous ecosystem to ensure safety in the real world, not just on paper.”
This will include assessments of over 700 safety portfolios, Gatik said, and will address the company’s organizational safety culture, engineering quality (for both functional, behavioral, and operational safety of the self-driving system), cyber security, and vehicle safety.
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“The real heavy-hitting point here is the breadth and the depth that is involved in the full assessment of our system, not just from a technology standpoint, but from an overall ecosystem standpoint, and the methods by which we conduct our testing and deployment, how we select our routes, the validation of the routes and networks that we undertake, both pre- and during freight-only operations, and all the supporting infrastructure to unlock safety for implementation on the customer side,” said Dr. Adam Campbell, Gatik’s Head of Safety. “[This includes safety for] other stakeholders, including how the first responder community interacts with our vehicles.
According to Campbell, ensuring stakeholder safety also entails the third-party companies evaluating Gatik’s engagement and training for first responders. The company has been working on assessing their case for about nine months, using Edge Case’s Open Autonomy Safety Case Framework as a starting point. As they progress, the company said it will continue to publicly share information on the assessment before deploying freight-only operations.
