Application of Functional Safety in Autonomous Vehicles Using ISO 26262 Standard: A Survey

Currently there is extensive research and investments in safety technologies, such as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) for enabling road vehicles to become intelligent and safer, thus making them detect and prevent possible accidents, assist the driver in changing lanes efficiently and making more accurate turns. Almost every automotive company is researching and developing autonomous vehicles. This huge amount of investment in terms of money and efforts might soon make self-driving vehicles a reality and we might start seeing autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles running together on the road. Along with the perks of these autonomous vehicles, some new risks are also introduced into the vehicle and road safety. The ISO 26262 is a standard that deals with the functional safety of the E/E (Electric and Electronic) components of a road vehicle. As of now, there is no such standard that directly applies to the functional safety of autonomous vehicles and hence, many researchers have tried to use this ISO 26262 standard as a guideline for developing software/hardware models for making autonomous vehicles compatible to the functional safety standards. This paper provides an overview of some of these methods or techniques by which functional safety can be introduced in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles.