Gatik AI, a trucking and delivery company specializing in autonomous middle-mile logistics, reaffirmed its commitment to safety by detailing the scope of a comprehensive safety case assessment for its Freight-Only operations (deliveries without a human driver onboard) across North America.
With this announcement, the company remains committed to launching these operations at scale, though only after satisfying a rigorous evaluation on its autonomous driving system by independent third parties. Through its new initiative, Gatik is looking to underscore its dedication to setting the highest standards for safety within autonomous trucking.
Key to the initiative is the input that Gatik will receive from two third-party companies, Edge Case Research and TÜV SÜD. As a global autonomy risk management provider, Edge Case Research has already deployed dedicated resources and personnel to implement its DevSafeOps process to support system development, testing, and safety engineering.
TÜV SÜD is an independent testing, inspection, and certification organization with experience in autonomous system safety assurance. For Gatik, the organization will assess the trucking company’s approach to safely deploying Freight-Only operations, and ultimately confirm that Gatik’s safety case fully conforms to key autonomy-related safety requirements, including UL4600.
In taking its Freight-Only network through this rigorous safety case assessment, ahead of its launch, Gatik is ultimately aiming to ensure that its key stakeholders, customers, federal, state and local government, the first responder community and the public can find confidence in the independently verified safety of its technology and deployment practices.
The assessment itself will encompass more than 700 identified safety portfolios and must be completed and closed before Gatik can begin its Freight-Only operations at scale. Here, the assessment will address many key pillars of AV safety, including organizational safety culture, engineering quality (assessing functional, behavioral and operational safety of Gatik’s self-driving system), cyber security, vehicle safety, and Safety Case conformity to UL4600.
Through its Safety Case, Gatik intends to facilitate traceability and transparency to all claims of safety that are made. By using Edge Case’s Open Autonomy Safety Case Framework as a base for its own Safety Case, Gatik is working to conform with the UL4600 standard. In conforming with UL4600, it will account for all facets of the safety case’s technology, operational and organizational factors – reflecting the breadth and depth of safety efforts being undertaken that Gatik says excel any of the requirements imposed by regulations today.
As part of its commitment to transparency within its broader approach to safety, Gatik will publicly share information on the progress being made towards the completion of the safety case program.
