Re-imagining ISO 26262 in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles: Enhancing Controllability through Transferability and Predictability

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

The ISO 26262 standard defines functional safety for road vehicles through risk assessments based on Severity, Exposure, and Controllability, grounded in a human-driven vehicle paradigm. In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the absence of a human driver necessitates revisiting these principles. This paper decomposes the Controllability placeholder into two auditable evidence dimensions of ISO 26262 by introducing two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. Transferability extends Controllability to capture AV systems' ability to hand off control to dedicated fallback safety mechanisms, while Predictability captures how easily external agents can anticipate AV behavior. Predictability is formally defined from human-robot interaction-inspired principles, and a mathematical framework is provided to quantify it. A designed-versus-achievable gap is introduced to distinguish architectural fallback claims from scene-conditioned achievable fallback capability. The proposed metrics align with ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF), rendering fallback and interaction claims falsifiable and traceable across ODD slices. These dimensions complement rather than replace existing standards, and the enhancements preserve the structure of ISO 26262 while extending its applicability to driverless automated systems operating at SAE Levels 4 and 5.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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