Achieving Safety through Validation Metrics for Autonomous Vehicles

Quresh Sutarwala serves as Systems Engineering Lead for Systems Verification and Validation at Kodiak Robotics, an industry leader in autonomous trucking. Quresh is responsible for building out the V&V framework, including evaluation of the Kodiak Driver and platform.
At Kodiak, Quresh leads efforts to related to Kodiak's driver-out program where he is responsible for building out safety validation frameworks, and technological developments towards building Kodiak’s driverless safety case in support of deploying a commercially viable driverless truck on public roads.

Building safe driverless vehicles is the cornerstone of Kodiak's vision. Quresh's work has impacted the design and architecture of the Kodiak Driver.His efforts in leading and developing testing frameworks ensures a high safety, quality, and performance standard. The testing suite and associated testing modalities cover the entire suite of testing, where tests are developed to ensure high integrity software and hardware and validate the safety and performance of the Kodiak system. As part of developing the driverless safety case, Quresh has identified key performance metrics and developed appropriate target thresholds to ensure that a high bar of safety is adhered. The work led and executed by Quresh has a direct impact on improving the safety of the fully driverless autonomous trucks on public roads.

Prior to Kodiak, Quresh served as the Head of Hardware Systems engineering at Nuro, a robotics company building an autonomous delivery vehicle, where he led the work to build a fully autonomous electric robot platform. During his time at Nuro, Quresh worked on multiple programs, leading the safety case efforts for Nuro's Prius platform and owning the vehicle platform safety case for Nuro's driver-less R2 and R3 robots. Quresh managed multiple verticals of Systems and Safety engineering, covering Hardware and Vehicle Platform systems

Quresh has also held various roles at Cummins, which included a System Integration Leader position, where he was part of the team that launched Cummins’s first electric power-train on a bus platform in 2019. Quresh is a graduate of University of Minnesota, where he received a master's degree in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science.