Perspectives on Safety for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomy is enabled by the close connection of traditional mechanical systems with information technology. Historically, both communities have built norms for validation and verification (V&V), but with very different properties for safety and associated legal liability. Thus, combining the two in the context of autonomy has exposed unresolved challenges for V&V, and without a clear V&V structure, demonstrating safety is very difficult. Today, both traditional mechanical safety and information technology rely heavily on process-oriented mechanisms to demonstrate safety. In contrast, a third community, the semiconductor industry, has achieved remarkable success by inserting design artifacts which enable formally defined mathematical abstractions. These abstractions combined with associated software tooling (Electronics Design Automation) provide critical properties for scaling the V&V task, and effectively make an inductive argument for system correctness from well-defined component compositions. This article reviews the current methods in the mechanical and IT spaces, the current limitations of cyber-physical V&V, identifies open research questions, and proposes three directions for progress inspired by semiconductors: (i) guardian-based safety architectures, (ii) functional decompositions that preserve physical constraints, and (iii) abstraction mechanisms that enable scalable virtual testing. These perspectives highlight how principles from semiconductor V&V can inform a more rigorous and scalable safety framework for autonomous systems.