First responders and traffic crash investigators collect and secure evidence necessary to determine the cause of a crash. As vehicles with advanced autonomous features become more common on the road, inevitably they will be involved in such incidents. Thus, traditional data collection requirements may need to be augmented to accommodate autonomous technology and the connectivity associated with autonomous and semi-autonomous driving features. The objective of this paper is to understand the data from a fielded autonomous system and to motivate the development of requirements for autonomous vehicle data collection.
The issue of data ownership and access will be discussed. Additional complicating factors, such as cybersecurity concerns combined with a first responder’s legal authority, may pose challenges for traditional data collection. These additional challenges pose an opportunity to develop standardized event recording and embedded software verification processes to provide sufficient data to replace firsthand vehicle operator accounts in autonomous vehicles. For this work, an autonomous mobile impact attenuator vehicle system was used to gather data that may appear from potential crash incidents. Data obtained from a combination of vehicle data from the J1939 networks, a precision GPS system as a truth source, and the onboard autonomy sensor logs for the attenuator vehicle was analyzed for completeness and usefulness in describing the incident that occurred. Findings indicate a shift in technique and strategy is needed for incident data collection for autonomous vehicles. Potential issues in the duration of the recording are also presented and discussed.