Standards Are Needed for Emergency Services Interactions with Automated Vehicles

Virtually anyone that has ever driven a vehicle has had to respond to police or other emergency vehicles while on the road. There are rules of the road about how drivers are supposed to behave when they see flashing emergency lights or hear sirens approaching. But what happens when there is no human in control of the vehicle? How is a police officer or firefighter supposed to interact with an automated vehicle (AV)?

In most locations, the law requires drivers to pull over to the side of the road and stop when an emergency vehicle is approaching and then resume after it has passed. For a traffic stop, drivers should pull over at the nearest safe location out of traffic. 

Automated Traffic Stops

Recently, a bystander recorded a video of a San Francisco police officer trying to pull over an automated Chevrolet Bolt being tested by Cruise. It appeared the reason for the stop was that the AV was running at night without headlights. This was most likely the result of someone that had worked on the car accidently hitting the headlamp switch and turning it from auto to manual or off. 

In the video, the Cruise AV can be seen stopped at a red light as the officer approaches. When the officer realizes there is no one in the car, he goes back to his vehicle and when the light turns green, the AV proceeds across the intersection and then comes to a stop again at a location deemed safer. 

In a statement, Cruise acknowledged that its AVs are programmed to find a safe location to stop in the event a police or other emergency vehicle is detected. In other words, the AV behaved as intended. Cruise AVs like many others have the capability for their perception systems to recognize the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle. AVs from Waymo, Cruise, and other automated driving system (ADS) developers are also equipped with external microphones that listen for sirens. This functionality should be one of the regulatory requirements for ADS.

How to Gain Access?

Although no citation was issued in this case, it does raise a broader question of how law enforcement or emergency personnel should interact with AVs. For example, if a passenger in a robotaxi was in medical distress, how does an emergency medical technician get inside to provide aid? Or if the AV violates some road rule, how does a police officer issue a ticket?

ADS development companies such as Cruise, Waymo, Argo AI, and Mobileye notify local officials when they begin operations in an area. But there are no global or national regulations or standards yet for how people gain access to these vehicles; everything is done ad hoc by individual companies. A uniform approach needs to be developed so that when there are multiple ADS companies operating, emergency services don’t need to figure out the unique solution for each vehicle. 

This problem is not trivial because of the need for security. We don’t want nefarious actors posing as emergency responders getting inappropriate access, so some form of secure authentication is needed. However, the process mustn’t be too onerous so that access can be provided promptly in the event of an actual emergency. Early commercial deployments of AVs are just beginning and still in very limited areas. This conversation needs to be happening now between federal, state and local regulators and the ADS companies and automakers before this technology scales up.