2025/02/14 by Leon Johann Brettin, Niklas Braun, Brettin, Leon Johann +5
Engineering · Psychology · #Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety #FOS: Electrical engineering #Human-Automation Interaction and Safety #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Traffic control and management #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.10243
openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.