Robo-Taxi Startup Voyage to Make its Autonomous Safety Systems Open Source

author: Eric Walz   

After a self-driving Uber vehicle fatality struck a pedestrian last month in Arizona, the nascent autonomous driving companies paused to reevaluate the hardware and software used to control self-driving cars—in order to prevent another incident like the one in Arizona from happening again.

Silicon Valley startup Voyage, which recently launched a pilot autonomous ride-hailing service in two retirement communities in California and Florida, is taken a proactive, safety first approach. Starting today, the company announced today it is opening its safety requirements, test scenarios, metrics, tools, and source code that it has developed for its own autonomous taxis.

The initial release, which Voyage calls ‘Open Autonomous Safety' (OAS), will reside in a GitHub repository containing documents and source code—available to any interested parties to utilize as needed.

OAS is a fully open-source library of Voyage's internal safety procedures, materials, and test code designed to supplement existing safety programs at autonomous vehicle startups across the world.

The OAS consist of four primary parts. The first is ‘scenario testing'. These important scenarios represent fundamental questions, such as how should an autonomous vehicle behave when it reaches a crosswalk and a pedestrian approaches from the right?

The OAS also includes other key areas including, functional safety, autonomy assessment and a complete testing toolkit. Voyage plans to add fault-injection testing in the future, to evaluate how a self-driving car reacts in the event of a hardware or software failure.

These scenarios, and many more, provide a rubric for assessing the practical capabilities of a self-driving vehicle while on the road in a suburban environment. The scenarios also introduce a qualitative dimension to Voyage's safety program.

"We don't just ask if one of our vehicles can complete a scenario, but also how well it performs." Voyage wrote in their blog post.

Voyage is not the first company working on self-driving technology to open its platform to developers. China's Baidu announced last year its Apollo platform, which consists of an entire suite of self-driving tools, including simulation and HD mapping technology open to any interested parties. Baidu's open source Apollo platform is looking to become the Android of self-driving cars.

This alpha release of OAS is designed to grow extensively in the coming months now that it's open to other developers. Voyage's aim is to cement its OAS as a foundational safety resource for the entire self-driving car industry.

Eric Walz

Originally from New Jersey, Eric is an automotive and technology reporter specializing in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley. Eric has over fifteen years of automotive experience and a B.A. in computer science. These skills, combined with technical writing and news reporting, allows him to fully understand and identify new and innovative technologies in the automotive industry and beyond. He has worked on self-driving cars and as a technical writer, helping people to understand and work with technology. Outside of work, Eric likes to travel to new places, play guitar, and explore the outdoors.