It will still be a few years before we will have autonomous buses driving city streets and squares without drivers. On the other hand, it should be possible to have autonomous buses in a depot at an early stage in order to ensure more efficient maintenance of the vehicles when they are not in service, while at the same time learning how to be part of future operations. Such buses would be type-approved for manual traffic (SAE level 0-2), but not approved for autonomous road operation (SAE level 4-5). During the span of a single day, the bus will therefore alternate between the regulations for enclosed (fenced depot) and non-enclosed (road) areas, between being autonomous and not autonomous. The bus, which was previously a legal “static whole”, will now instead be tested based on two regulations depending on the environment it is in at any given time and level of autonomy. This is a completely new situation: that a bus is “dynamically divisible” from a regulatory perspective, which has significance in terms of who shall decide whether the vehicle is safe to use in a certain environment. After analysing the challenges based on existing regulations, interviewing relevant authorities, arranging workshops with various stakeholders and meetings with experts in certification, our conclusion is that, in order to be considered safe in autonomous mode within the depot, the bus should be self-certified by means of CE marking according to the Machinery Directive1. This is the authors’ conclusion and not necessarily representative of the other parties involved in the project. We predict that we will see more self-certification of autonomous vehicles in the future. Partly because there are such large international markets working in this way, such as in North America, and partly because it enables faster market introduction of dynamic vehicle concepts. With “dynamic vehicle concept” we mean vehicles that gain new areas of application by replacing the chassis or changing software settings and are thus converted from a bus to a ...
Self-certification of Autonomous Buses
2021-01-01
Paper
Electronic Resource
English
DDC: | 629 |
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