Unmanned Vehicle Safety: 10 Commandments to Live By

摘要

Unmanned vehicles appear to be everywhere: undersea, at airports, overhead, in space, on Mars, and in Iraq. Itseems everyone is getting unmanned vehicles: NASA, Military, police departments, and civilians. The world ischanging as technology changes, which is rapidly. Technology exists today that allows smart machines to replacehuman activity in dangerous situations. Robotic systems are used for surveillance, minesweeping, boarder control,port authority, just to name a few. Although removing ourselves from these dangerous activities is good, we mustensure that different “just as dangerous” activities have not been created. For example, has the probability forfriendly fire causalities increased? Has the interface with humans become uncontrollable? Can the Robotic systemgo out of control? Does the Robotic have self-defense capability that could go haywire? Has testing/validation ofthe Robotic system introduced dangerous situations for the tester/observer? While we cannot answer all thesequestions, it is our duty to provide some safety guidance to the new and improved theme of the technical world.The intent of this paper is to provide a set of guidelines, 10 Commandments, for use by any system thatcontemplates incorporation of autonomous functions intended to replace human intervention/control. This paperwill investigate unmanned systems and their impact on system safety analyses. Specifically, we want to address thesituations where the operator has been taken out of the loop but others have potentially and unknowingly been put inharms way (I.e., real time testing in the field, real time testing in wartime, accidents/crashes in civilian territory,etc.). The 10 Commandments of Unmanned Vehicle Safety will be presented in this paper such that the reader canapply them to their unmanned system. Lessons learned will be provided where applicable and specific exampleswill be used to illustrate the commandments. These 10 Commandments are intended to be a minimum set ofguidelines to which other commandments will be added. As always, one must tailor these guidelines and otherguidelines and requirements as justified by a particular system.Every “reg-toting” safety engineer knows the safety requirements applicable to their system. Safety engineers helpthe system team tailor the core safety requirements to fit the boundaries of the project. Our 10 Commandments areintended to provide safety engineers with additional measures to ensure that safety is incorporated into the systemarchitecture for the entire life cycle. The safety engineer should ask routinely, “Is this system adhering to the 10Commandments of Unmanned Vehicle Safety or is this project headed for that dark gloomy place where no onewants to go?”