Redundancy in a road-follower for safety, reliability and availability

The current state of automated highway technology is that the developers and researchers have to be nearby their systems to keep them running. At some point this technology is to be packaged and handed to the "common user". The common user will not understand the technology that they will be dependent on for a safe commute. In order to hand-off this technology to the common driver, the safety, reliability and availability of these systems must be addressed. In this paper, we describe an architecture which implements a diversity of modality redundancy philosophy to improve the safety, reliability and availability of the automated highway technology. This architecture incorporates redundancy at all levels of the system, from the sensing of the environment to the set of redundant automated capabilities. The architecture incorporates, but is not limited to machine vision, navigation system technology and magnetometer technology. The use of this multilevel redundancy substantially reduces the risk of failure and can greatly improve the safety, reliability and availability of this technology.