Governance Node Seminar - Anthony Corso & Sydney Katz, Stanford University

Autonomous systems are poised to improve both safety and efficiency across many safety critical domains including transportation and healthcare. Before deployment, these systems must undergo rigorous testing to build trust and ensure their safe operation. In this talk, we will provide an overview of verification and validation (V&V) approaches that may be used by the designers and regulators of safety critical autonomous systems. The approaches will be illustrated with an example system from aviation: a camera-based autonomous taxiing system. We will discuss the strengths and limitations of each approach and argue that regulation should require a wide variety of V&V techniques to be applied before certification.