Loblaw Commissions Third-Party Safety Review Endorsing Gatik’s Autonomous Technology for Fully Driverless Operations

Gatik, the market leader in autonomous middle mile logistics, revealed details of an extensive third-party safety assessment undertaken prior to deploying the first ever fully driverless commercial operations in Canada. The safety assessment was commissioned by Canada’s leading food and pharmacy retailer, Loblaw Companies Limited

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“Safety is not achieved by any one factor, but by the combination of best-practices, multiple layers of system redundancy, cutting edge techniques, exhaustive validation, sound engineering judgment and continually building upon our proven record of delivering exceptional results”

“Safety is at the heart of everything we do at Gatik,” said Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder, Gatik. “We integrate safety into all facets of our business, from initial concept to commercial deployment. It spans every level of our technology, processes and operations, and resides deep in the cultural make-up of the company. We were very pleased to participate in the extensive safety review, and strongly encourage this level of scrutiny becoming standard across our industry.”

Gatik operates its network of autonomous box trucks across several cities, both in the US and Canada. This includes fully driverless operations at two sites and autonomous operations with safety drivers in 5 markets. At present, the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry awaits the implementation of common standards to evaluate and confirm the safety & security of AV systems before they are rolled out for broader adoption. Today’s announcement underlines Gatik’s commitment to providing transparency and clarity on the company’s systems engineering approach to the safe development and deployment of its autonomous fleet.

The exhaustive three-month assessment of Gatik’s technology was designed to evaluate safety and security prior to the launch of Gatik’s fully driverless commercial delivery service with Loblaw. A team of third-party experts was deployed to create and execute a framework for evaluation of Gatik’s end-to-end technology solution covering the landscape of standards from ISO/SAE and NHTSA including security standards NIST Framework, SAE J3061, ISO/SAE 21434 and UNECE R155. The assessment included a rigorous suite of system as well as component level tests, the successful completion of which provided clear and comprehensive validation that Gatik’s fully driverless technology is acceptably safe to operate on public roads.

Under the assessment, Gatik’s system underwent testing which included: evaluation of the end-to-end technology solution, development & deployment processes, standards & regulatory compliance, risk assessment & evaluation of control measures as well as physical component, subsystem and vehicle level testing. The physical testing of these vehicles on Gatik’s closed courses included fault injection & several edge case tests – for example degrading & injecting fault on sensor data, GPS jamming/spoofing to disrupt navigation, disabling brakes or sending incorrect acceleration commands with objects in front. This also included overriding RADAR and LIDAR data representing false empty road situations to the system, while having real objects in front of the truck mimic sensor failures or malicious hacking. The results confirmed Gatik’s autonomous technology does not create an unreasonable risk to the safety of other road users.

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“Canada is on the cusp of enormous potential in the driverless commercial delivery space, a space that’s being led by Loblaw,” said Vivek Khindria, Senior Vice President Cyber Security, Networks and Technology Risk. “We commissioned a third-party independent assessment to validate the security and safety of Gatik’s autonomous system, and are pleased with the results.”

“Safety is not achieved by any one factor, but by the combination of best-practices, multiple layers of system redundancy, cutting edge techniques, exhaustive validation, sound engineering judgment and continually building upon our proven record of delivering exceptional results,” said Apeksha Kumavat, co-founder and Chief Engineer at Gatik. “We embraced the opportunity for our system to undergo a stringent review process and validate our technology ahead of commencing fully driverless operations with the country’s largest retailer.”

Gatik’s failsafe approach to fully driverless operations is built upon the company’s foundational Operational Design Domain (ODD) framework which aims to provide a structure to define the capabilities of the autonomous stack at any given point, and connect those capabilities to the routes and operating areas. This enables Gatik to deploy, test & validate targeted releases incrementally, enabling the structured expansion of ODDs for fully driverless operations in a predictable and value-driven manner. This in turn enables Gatik to deploy on a given route that has been safety validated while developing additional functional capabilities on other routes, paving the way for continued commercial expansion of Gatik’s fully driverless operations.

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