Aurora’s Safety Case Framework

A Safety Case Framework combines guidance from government organizations, best practices from safety-critical industries, voluntary industry standards and consortia, academic research, and what an organization has learned in its own work. In the autonomous vehicle industry, it’s an important tool for developing self-driving vehicles that will operate safely on public roads and delivering these vehicles to partners, customers, and the public.

Aurora’s Safety Case Framework is the first self-driving framework ever to address the safety of both autonomous trucks and passenger cars. We developed it to help us evaluate the entire development lifecycle for both our trucking and passenger mobility products, so that we deliver both a safe and scalable product to our partners and customers.

As we continue to learn and expand our testing operations to new environments and platforms, our Framework will evolve. We will adapt it to different scenarios, including operations with and without a human driver, varied platforms, and expanded environments.The Framework portion here is just our first version. We are sharing the top four levels of the Framework because it’s important for our partners, customers, and the public to understand why we are confident in our progress towards delivering the Aurora Driver. We will continue to share updates to our Framework as it evolves.

This in-depth explanation provides insight into the principles and applications of the Aurora Safety Case Framework. You can also read our announcement here.

updated as of 01/2023

Aurora’s self-driving vehicles are acceptably safe to operate on public roads

G5

Trustworthy

The self-driving enterprise is trustworthy

G4

Resilient

The self-driving vehicle is acceptably safe in case of reasonably foreseeable misuse and unavoidable events

G3

Continuously Improving

All identified potential safety issues posing an unreasonable risk to safety are evaluated, and resolved with appropriate corrective and preventative actions

G2

Fail-Safe

The self-driving vehicle is acceptably safe in presence of faults and failures

G1

Proficient

The self-driving vehicle is acceptably safe during nominal operation

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