Navya ARMA Incident

On December [XXX], 2022, a Navya ARMA shuttle operated by Beep (VIN 1N9A1SACXJS[XXX]) was involved in a non-injury collision while operating in manual mode on [XXX] in Port Saint Lucie, FL. While driving along [XXX] under autonomous control, the shuttle encountered a parked vehicle partially blocking its path, requiring disengagement of the autonomous drive system. The safety driver attempted to manually drive the shuttle around the parked vehicle to reengage the autonomous drive system. While manually steering the shuttle around the parked vehicle blocking its path, the shuttle failed to respond to manual control input and steered to the left, impacting a parked vehicle at a low rate of speed on the opposite side of [XXX]. The six passengers onboard alighted the shuttle, an accident report was filed with the local police, and the shuttle was removed from the scene. Initial reports from the onboard safety driver indicated that while steering around the vehicle blocking the shuttle's path, the shuttle became unresponsive to control input. The safety driver released the operator present button on the vehicle controller, which serves as dead man switch however, the vehicle failed to stop. After the incident, further investigation by Navya confirmed that the root cause of the incident was a failure of the Xbox 360 controller used to manually control the vehicle. Contact with the parked vehicle occurred between the time of failure and the vehicle drive system recognizing that the controller had failed an elapsed time of 4.05 seconds. In response to the incident, Beep suspended operation of all Navya ARMA vehicles pending identification and implementation of appropriate solutions to mitigate the risk of this failure leading to future incidents. Subsequent investigation by Beep and Navya determined that the vehicle control software, NavyaDrive, is limited in its ability to monitor the validity of control signal input received from the Xbox 360 controller. As the safety driver began to manually steer the vehicle, the controller failed, sending constant turning input to the vehicle drive system leading to the collision. Though Navya developed software mitigations due to prior issues encountered with the controller, those mitigations were ineffective with respect to the failure leading to the incident on December [XXX]. Further, due to the short time between the controller failing and the collision (2.34sec), the safety driver was unable to identify the controller failure and trigger the emergency stop before the collision occurred. In response to the incident, Navya is integrating a revised manual control system on the ARMA shuttle platform. The revised manual control system utilizes industrial-grade components for improved electromechanical reliability and allows for active monitoring of the control system health, eliminating the root cause of the failure that led to the incident on December [XXX]. Software upgrades of all Navya ARMA vehicles will further reintroduce automated braking function while the ARMA vehicle is under manual control. Beep is working with Navya to retrofit its fleet of ARMA vehicles with the revised manual control system as well as retrain and recertify its safety driver staff on the updated NavyaDrive software. Discussion of the root cause analysis and solution design for the revised manual control system will be provided to NHTSA as a supplement to this report.