Francesca Favarò | Waymo – Safety for Automated Driving Systems & Waymo’s Approach to Safety

Future of Mobility

This is a repost of Episode 158, originally aired on June 4, 2023. This conversation was the 5th most popular Future of Mobility episode in 2023. ...

Francesca Favarò is the Lead for the Safety Best Practices team at Waymo, where she coordinates external engagement with standards developing organizations

Key topics in this conversation include:

• The absence of unreasonable risk for automated driving systems
• Waymo’s layered approach to safety, including hardware, the ADS behavioral layer, and operations
• The dynamic approach to safety
• Waymo’s credible approach to safety
• The importance of collaboration and a common language amongst the automated driving community
• IEEE Std 2846 and reasonably foreseeable behaviors of other road users

Links:

• Show notes: ⁠http://brandonbartneck.com/futureofmobility/francesafavaro⁠
• ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ffavaro3/⁠
• Waymo’s safety page: ⁠https://waymo.com/safety/⁠
• Waymo’s safety case whitepaper: ⁠https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents/safety/Waymo%20Safety%20Case%20Approach.pdf⁠)

Francesca’s Bio:

Francesca Favarò is the Lead for the Safety Best Practices team at Waymo, where she coordinates external engagement with standards developing organizations. Prior to joining Waymo in 2020, she was an Associate Professor at San Jose State University’s Department of Aviation and Technology and a Research Associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute. Francesca earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech, and received her M.S. in Space Engineering and B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico di Milano.

About Waymo:

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. Since our start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has been focused on building, deploying, and commercializing the World’s Most Experienced Driver™ technology to improve the world's access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, the world's first fully autonomous ride-hailing service, as well as Waymo Via, our trucking and local delivery service. To date, Waymo has autonomously driven tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions of miles in simulation, across 13+ U.S. states

Future of Mobility:

The Future of Mobility podcast is focused on the development and implementation of safe, sustainable, effective, and accessible mobility solutions, with a spotlight on the people and technology advancing these fields.

⁠linkedin.com/in/brandonbartneck/⁠

⁠brandonbartneck.com/futureofmobility/