We believe that autonomous vehicles should be built safely from the ground up.
Edge Case is the trusted risk-management partner for companies building self-driving trucks, autonomous robotaxis, and smarter passenger cars. We help developers and operators measure, manage, and insure the risks posed by software driving in the real world. Our mission is to deliver the promise of safe autonomous mobility.
“Automated vehicles (AVs) are coming to America’s roadways. They are not coming as quickly as was forecast five years ago—partly because the people developing them now have a clearer understanding of how difficult it is to make them safe—but incremental progress continues to be made in improving AV safety. This progress adds urgency to the need to understand when AVs can be considered acceptably safe—that is, safe enough to operate on public roads without the oversight of a human, professional safety driver.”
RAND Corporation // “Safe Enough: Approaches to Assessing Acceptable Safety for Automated Vehicles”
Build, monitor, and measure your live safety case
Edge Case provides the experts and software to efficiently and effectively build your safety argument.
Our customers look to Edge Case to understand and communicate their autonomous system’s safety and to reduce residual risk.
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What is safe enough?
Safety is about creating and supporting an evidence-based argument in the form of a safety case. Edge Case provides the software and services needed to build, measure, manage, and communicate that argument. -
System safety isn’t a “bolt on” activity for automated and autonomous systems. Complex systems must be built safely from the ground up, and that means that all stakeholders need to be working together.
We help you assemble the right stakeholders into a system safety working group, set clear goals for a system safety program, and establish an effective safety management plan. Prepare your organization for the effort ahead.
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The Edge Case team has been building safety cases for autonomous vehicles for over a decade. We deliver that experience to our customers by providing safety case templates in the nLoop platform. Think of these templates like a roadmap, defining practical safety objectives and processes.
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Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) monitor the validity of your safety case, alerting you to problems and providing insight into the state of your system. Edge Case assists our customers to identify the right SPIs, define what is an acceptable threshold to target, and provides the nLoop software to monitor them.
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Edge Case’s nLoop software lets you manage your safety case and communicate its state inside and outside your organization. It connects to the sources of evidence required to populate your metrics.
The Edge Case approach starts with UL 4600
UL 4600 is the only system safety standard for SAE L4+ autonomous systems, but it’s not a simple checklist and it doesn’t mean that other functional safety standards don’t apply. Edge Case provides the right playbook and process to build a 4600-conformant safety case. Our approach has three pillars:
Live It Right
Success depends on strong safety culture. You may be building an autonomous system, but at the end of the day it’s about people and process. Plan a feasible roadmap for achieving safe autonomy throughout your system’s lifecycle.
Engineer It Right
Don’t let complexity get in the way of using rigorous engineering techniques. Multiply your system safety experience along with the right hazard analysis tools to accurately assess and then reduce risks.
Operate It Right
“Walk the walk” by operating according to your safety plan. Continuously monitor your risk with the right combination of expert judgment and automated data analysis. Quickly understand and mitigate new risks identified in the field.
The nLoop Live Safety Case
The nLoop live safety case processes data from simulation testing, on-road testing, and field operations to support continuous improvement and re-validation.
Traditional safety cases are static documents, out of date the day after they’re approved.
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It’s not enough to build a single, static safety case. Your system evolves quickly both technologically and as a business. New system and component versions are constantly being developed; scaled deployment that testing in new ODDs is a business requirement. That’s why Edge Case delivers its live safety case in the only platform purpose-built for it: nLoop.
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You have not just one team but many working towards a common goal, but every team works at its own pace in service to that goal. Edge Case believes that the safety case can and should be the organizing principle to coordinate your teams.
That’s why we built nLoop to be as much of a communication tool as anything else. nLoop allows you to communicate the state of your safety case and create action to help your product, system engineering, development, and testing teams work in sync. nLoop gives them the context to be able to build the right tests and generate the right data to support your safety claims.
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nLoop is more than a software platform. It’s a roadmap for how you can deploy safely and responsibly. nLoop connects your simulation test results, on-road data, and safety engineering work products to a customizable safety case template. Users can monitor potential threats to the safety case and monitor progress mitigating hazards.
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Autonomy safety standards like UL 4600 require constant iteration and monitoring. The nLoop safety case template provides a basis to trace your safety argument to clauses in existing safety standards.
In addition, nLoop monitors complex safety cases with thousands of nodes. It processes large datasets to calculate suitability of evidence and monitor safety performance indicators, proving the validity of your safety case. -
Ultimately, nLoop helps customers make smarter risk acceptance decisions. nLoop users benefit from traditional safety-critical techniques from defense and aerospace for identifying, tracking, and mitigating risks.
How does nLoop work?
The nLoop architecture begins with artifact and evidence providers that connect to safety engineering work products, development artifacts, design documents, test results, and operational data. Based on this information, nLoop provides insight into hazard tracking and mitigation, traceability, and safety case evaluation. Interfaces allow users to connect to sources of evidence to assess risk, request follow up tests, update the safety case, and generate reports.
Trucking
Commercial autonomous trucking is just around the corner, and Edge Case works with multiple customers in the sector. Trucking represents a $4tn market globally. Economic benefits such as increased vehicle uptime and reduced fleet operating costs require that autonomous trucks operate safely at scale. Safety will also help drive down the costs of commercial trucking insurance.
Customers like Locomation work with Edge Case to establish their safety case in preparation for widespread testing and commercial operations.
Ridehailing
Edge Case helps developers and operators of robotaxis: fleets of fully-autonomous cars ready to drive passengers through our cities and neighborhoods. Ridehailing is a $35bn business globally with human labor representing a primary cost driver. Autonomy promises to improve safety while expanding network access by driving down costs.
Customers like Uber ATG (now a subsidiary of Aurora) have for years relied on Edge Case to establish safety cases ready for full-scale driverless operation.
Passenger Cars
Not all “software drivers” are fully autonomous. Today, cars feature advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) capable of negotiating traffic jams and changing lanes without human oversight. Well built ADAS promises to save lives on the road and reduce premiums for personal automobile insurance.
Customers like BMW work with Edge Case to perform rigorous safety assessments based on results of scenario testing in high-performance virtual environments.
Delivery and Logistics
Local goods delivery represents a $100bn global business. Other major logistics markets include shuttles, yard operations, and warehousing. Autonomous mobility stands to increase efficiency, expand operations, and improve reliability of all these applications. But once again, these benefits only arrive if safety is achieved at scale.
Customers like Robotic Research turn to Edge Case to establish system safety as the foundation for an array of promising use cases.
