And I know that in the green room, we got Michelle Chaka. She’s the director for safety assurance and standards at Locomation. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. So how are things going? You know, I was just on your LinkedIn and I saw that you were at the Michigan international Speedway. We got a picture from that guy. Show that. Please tell us a little bit about what was happening there.
Michelle Chaka
Yeah, thanks. Well, it was, it was an incredibly cold, but I’m not as sure as, as it’s cool as being here with you today, but you know, I have a big thanks to my dad. He’s a huge car guy and this was on his bucket list. And just a little bit about me. I grew up in Southeast Michigan. So I believe the auto industry, it was kind of the way of life. I, so, you know, it’s an experience that my family and I will never forget. And, you know, you said that, you know, I’m the director of safety insurance at localization. And so as a mom that has worked in safety, my entire career, you know, seeing my kids drive 140 around a track, you know, for some reason when I did it was no problem, but I’m telling you, my heart was in my stomach when they were going around it.
But what did you know? It really did help me reflect on you, just how cool that the industry is and how lucky I am to work at local nation and work on the technology of the future. So.
Speaker 0
You know, that’s a great, that’s a great, well, that’s a great point you make too, because like autonomous companies, and I know that there, there, there there’s some fear, right? And that’s part of the, the industry’s job is to quell those fears. Cause we all have family members on the road and these companies, aren’t all just empty black boxes or there’s real people here who have different approaches to safety, what is [inaudible] approach to human guided autonomy.
Michelle Chaka
Yeah. And you know what, honestly, you know, my job as the assurance director of safety, safety assurance and standards is I really lead our development and implementation of safety metrics, policies, standards, and procedures. So I’m really kind of overseeing exactly how we’re, we’re going through that. And so one of the reasons I, I really drew me to logo nation is really their approach to being able to combine the best of both worlds. So combined that the humans, what humans do really well and what autonomy does really well. And so the bottom line is, you know, don’t tell my bosses, but my job is, is a little bit easier because you know, we’re starting from that really knowledgeable experience and a really great approach on how to go forward with autonomy.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So Michelle, we want to get into the V S S a and local nations in particular, but before we do that, what is a VSS, a voluntary safety self-assessment.
Michelle Chaka
Yeah, so VSA, so voluntary safety self-assessment and this is really based on us department, the U S department of transportation guidance for really asking automakers to balance, fairly summarize, you know, how are you as a maker of automated driving systems, addressing safety. And so they’ve outlined 12 different priorities. And from a safety perspective, that automakers should be thinking about everything from cyber to security, to information you’re providing to the drivers crash, worthiness education training, really even post-crash response.
Speaker 0
So what did your VSSA happen to say?
Michelle Chaka
Yeah, well, anyways, well, let’s start with why it matters and why we’re doing this right now. And so it really serves as a marker to our progress. So why we’re doing it now is we’re demonstrating our readiness to start testing on public roads. And so local nation began testing on in Pennsylvania in Ohio. And this VSL really helps us tell the public, tell people like you, you know what we’re doing to make sure that our technology is safe and how we’re ensuring that the way we’re going about our, our testing is safe and in compliance with all the regulatory requirements.
Speaker 2
No, that’s beautiful. So what, what exactly does your VSSA say inside of it? I started going through it and it’s quite lengthy, but can you summarize what was in it?
It had great pictures. I looked at all the pictures. I swear. I read every picture and I, I heard.
Speaker 0
You’re a model. I heard you’re a model in that big calendar.
Speaker 2
I read, I looked at every picture. I read the topics of each one of them, but I didn’t get into all of the details. And it was quite lengthy and a lot of stuff involved there. What is going on there?
Michelle Chaka
Yeah, well, we really did want to lay out in a way that everyone could understand, but really that’s the details of what we’re doing. And so, you know, at the, you know, at the start of it, what we try to describe as our approach to safety. And so our via say describes what we call our safety case. And this is a structured argument that’s based on evidence to justify why we’re safe. And so this isn’t just something that’s being used by the autonomous trucking companies. It’s used in many safety, critical industries, such as nuclear and aerospace also use this same kind of approach.
And so we’ve centered our safety case around one single objective. And so this really is how our autonomous relays should be acceptably safe to operate on roads. And so when I mean by this is making sure that it is free of unreasonable risk and harm to humans and property. And so we start with that top level objective and we break it down to what are we doing to engineer it, right? What are we doing to manufacture it, right? What are we doing to operate it? And how are we improving the technology in a safe manner? And so if you want, I can just take you through a couple of aspects and give you some examples.
Speaker 2
Sure. Why not? Sounds great.
Speaker 0
Let’s hear.
Michelle Chaka
So if you’re going to have autonomous technology, one of the most important things you need to do is understand where you’re deploying this technology, what it does in that environment and what kind of conditions you are going to operate in? And so I talked a bit about what Locomation’s approach is, you know, has the best of both worlds of combining what a human does well and what a autonomous system does. Well, and so, you know, as a human, you know, we can recognize and understand context, what come across, along the road and autonomy, you know, really has precision of control and the ability to react to that.
And so when you take those two systems and you put those together, you know, I’m sure all your truck drivers can understand – that have some crazy story about some object or event that happened on the roadway. And so, you know, when you think about delivering a fully autonomous vehicle, I’ll tell you the first 10, you know, 90% is pretty easy. It’s that last 10% that’s really, really hard. And so one of the most important things that you need to do is understand that driving space. And so we go into a lot of detail in our VSL, how we’re using a whole bunch of different data sources and testing. And in order to make sure that we understand all of the conditions and operating environments that we will be deploying in.
And another big point is no matter how safe you can make this vehicle, you will always have some sort of fault and failures. And so we’re being really careful when we’re engineering our system, to make sure that we have redundancy in all of our safety, critical systems and that there isn’t one single point of failure. And so we go through in great detail about how we handle faults and how our human driver can safely, you know, put that vehicle in a safe state. And if it’s an immediate hazard, how our 10, this truck will put that vehicle in a safe state.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I saw that part of it, the controls there, where the driver can kind of take control over what’s going on there, if it gets into a situation, right? Yeah.
Speaker 0
Yeah. I’ll really importantly to Michelle. If someone wants to check this out or get more information about the VSSA work and I send them to.
Michelle Chaka
Yeah. You can head over to our website. So Locomation.com.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 0
No. So he’s not looking at me. Is it looking patient.ai? Don’t we read this all.
Speaker 2
Convention.ai is what I say all the time.
Speaker 0
[Inaudible] I, Michelle I’m like, I have read that like 600 times now. So I think that it’s yeah. Go there.
Speaker 2
To show Michelle.
Speaker 0
Say hi to Glynn for us.
Speaker 1
You too hard copy.
Speaker 0
Oh, excellent. We’ll say hi to Glynn for us and have a great weekend.
Michelle Chaka
All right. Great. Thank you so much. Take it easy.