Mission Critical: Self-Driving Cars

V O L U M E 3 N O . 2 • M a y 2 0 1 3 • A U V S I • 2 7 0 0 S o u t h Q u i n c y S t r e e t , S u i t e 4 0 0 , A r l i n g t o n , VA 2 2 2 0 6 , U S A

Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military

Inside this issue:

Companies Ready Commercial Driverless Cars The Price of Technology Changes Insurance Remains a Hurdle

Driverless Car

sUMMiT 11-12 June 2013

Sound Board at MotorCity Hotel • Detroit

Driverless Cars in 2022…

Making the Vision a Reality

RegisteR Now! auvsi.org/dcs

2

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

CONTENTS VOLUME 3 NO.2 • May 2013

On the Cover 8 Driverless Convoys

and Carrying Cargo

4

Robotics Lighten the Load

Essential Components The Latest News in Driverless Cars

6

State of the Art

Where the Driverless Car Action is Around the Globe

12

Uncanny Valley

Rules of the Road: States Vie for Driverless Cars

13 Technology Gap Driving Down the Cost of Change

On the Cover: Oshkosh Defense’s TerraMax technology can convert military trucks to self-driving vehicles, one of several kits on the market that allow increased automation to military customers. Photo courtesy Oshkosh Defense. Page 8.

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

1

14 Q & A Tom Bamonte, North Texas Tollway Authority

16 Timeline Federal Programs Go Driverless

22

Testing, Testing SAIC and the Michigan DOT Test Bed Gear Up

18 Driving the Market Auto Companies Vie for Unmanned Dominance

27 End Users Insurance: Is Your Driverless Car in Good Hands?

25

Spotlight

Advertiser Index Airborne Law Enforcement Association.....11 www.alea.org

Information on the Fleet Automation Forum

Mission Critical is published four times a year as an official publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Contents of the articles are the sole opinions of the authors and do not necessarily express the policies or opinion of the publisher, editor, AUVSI or any entity of the U.S. government. Materials may not be reproduced without written permission. All advertising will be subject to publisher’s approval and advertisers will agree to indemnify and relieve publisher of loss or claims resulting from advertising contents. Annual subscription and back issue/reprint requests may be addressed to AUVSI.

2

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Editor's Message

Editorial Vice President of Communications and Publications, Editor Brett Davis davis@auvsi.org Managing Editor Danielle Lucey lucey@auvsi.org

Contributing Writers Paul Godsmark Gabriel Sniman David A. McNamara Mohammad Poorsartep Advertising Senior Advertising and Marketing Manager Lisa Fick fick@auvsi.org +1 571 255 7779

A publication of

Driverless Cars Gaining Traction

S

elf-driving cars is a special topic for Mission Critical magazine.

Now in its third year of covering commercial robotics topics, Mission Critical’s very first issue tackled the emerging field of driverless vehicles.

Now, more than two years after that, the industry has seen a slew of commercial automobile manufacturers pledge driverless cars in the next 10 years.

This magazine takes a look at where we are now with driverless vehicles.

Editor Brett Davis dives into the military world, where the technology got its start on unmanned ground vehicles.

Many of these technologies have come a long way since their infancy. To read more on that, see Page 8.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Paul Godsmark and Gabriel Sniman from DriverlessCarHQ.com surveyed the commercial landscape of self-driving vehicles. Automotive companies are revving their engines, gearing up to be the first with an autonomous vehicle on the road. See that story on Page 18.

In preparation for AUVSI’s Detroitbased Driverless Car Summit in June, this issue discusses two Michigan-centric projects aimed at furthering selfdriving cars.

President and CEO Michael Toscano Executive Vice President Gretchen West AUVSI Headquarters 2700 South Quincy Street, Suite 400 Arlington, VA 22206 USA +1 703 845 9671 info@auvsi.org www.auvsi.org

The first is Michigan’s Connected Vehicle Test Bed, where companies like SAIC are performing a large-scale field test of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicleto-infrastructure technology so they may one day be nationally adopted.

The second is the newly formed Fleet Automation Forum. This group, originally conceptualized within the U.S. Army, is assessing how driverless vehicles will affect commercial trucking.

AUVSI and the University of Michigan are supporting this effort that aims to accelerate technology commercialization.

Danielle Lucey

Just how will legislators, regulators and private insurers keep up with this increased energy in the self-driving car market? Mission Critical addresses those issues throughout its departments.

Uncanny Valley, on Page 12, reviews the many laws and legislative approaches states are taking to ensure they have a future closely tied to driverless technology.

On Page 13, we take a look at Southwest Research Institute, a company that is focusing on low-cost technology to enable consumers to one day purchase driverless vehicles. The company is taking lessons it learned from a Navy program with a similar focus and translating that to the commercial market.

Our Q&A on Page 14 is with Tom Bamonte, general counsel for the North Texas Tollway Authority. He has a unique legal perspective on how cities can prepare for self-driving cars, including simple changes to basic infrastructure and how to properly manage data from these vehicles.

Guy Fraker, a technology consultant and former insurance agent, discusses the difficulties of insuring driverless cars. How will an industry used to having lots of crash data set prices for cars intent on not crashing? He explains challenges like this one on Page 27.

I hope you enjoy reading all the new information in this issue. Perhaps the next time we visit the topic of driverless cars, there will be a few being tested on a roadway near you.

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

3

Essential Components

Oxford Builds GPS-Free RobotCar

Driverless Cars by 2015? 2020? 2040?

The University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science is rolling out a new self-driving car concept, called RobotCar UK that uses an iPad as its user interface.

When driverless cars will actually hit the streets is anyone’s guess, but researchers and auto manufacturers themselves are projecting many possibilities as to when they will hit the commercial market.

The project uses a Nissan Leaf with an off-the-shelf computer in the trunk that is connected to cameras and lasers. The project, which started in September 2012, doesn’t use GPS or 3-D sensors, however, instead relying on mathematic probability and machine learning techniques for navigation.

The car company with the most aggressive claim to date is Audi, which projected at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it will have a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2015.

“Even when GPS is available, it does not offer the accuracy required for robots to make decisions about how and when to move safely,” says the RobotCar UK website. “Even if it did, it would say nothing about what is around the robot, and that has a massive impact on autonomous decision making.”

BMW says highly automated vehicles will hit European roadways in 2020.

Photo courtesy BMW Group.

“Piloted drive could accompany us from 2015,” said Dr. Wolfgang Durheimer, from Audi’s management board on technical development. “We have the system under control.”

The University of Oxford’s RobotCar UK concept doesn’t use 3-D sensors or GPS for navigation.

Photo courtesy the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group.

The Oxford Mobile Robotics Group, a team of 22 researchers lead by two professors, has built its own navigation system for 5,000 pounds. The team performs the navigation, planning and control algorithms on its own but gains technical support and hardware from Nissan, which is their sponsor. The project is also backed by the U.K.’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Guidance Navigation Ltd. and the Motor Industry Research Association.

Click this QR code to see a video of RobotCar UK’s autonomous start through its iPad interface.

4

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Meanwhile, a February press release by BMW and Continental states they will have highly automated vehicles by 2020 on European roads. The two have teamed up for a 2013 through 2014 project to prototype these kinds of vehicles, with the ultimate goal of accident-free mobility.

The companies will perform tests on German and European roads with these vehicles until the end of 2014.

The tests will monitor performance at intersections, toll stations, construction and around national borders.

However, research group IDC put a damper on those estimates with its March 2013 document “Connected Vehicle Ecosystems: Drivers (and Barriers) of Adoption.”

Author Sheila Brennan says driverless cars will likely be adopted by the public closer to 2040 because of multiple barriers.

“I think there are a lot of regulators and a lot of privacy and security issues that need to be overcome prior to that, a lot of interoperability issues that need to be overcome,” Brennan says. “And the automotive industry in general moves very slowly in many senses.”

Essential Components

Someday, Will Driverless Car Tech Kill Traffic Lights?

A University of Missouri-Kansas City professor believes that one day, software that automates vehicle movement at intersections could do away with traffic lights.

“The idea is not a driverless car. Driverless cars take away the fun of driving. The main objective is to improve traffic flow inside the city and do away with the traffic lights, because they are expensive to maintain,” Vijay Kumar told the University News, UM-CK’s independent student newspaper.

Currently, Kumar is studying the “ambiguity effect” where drivers make decisions despite a lack of information. Ambiguous and delayed decisions can result in an accident. However, a number of newer model cars use software to enable better driver decision making through technologies like lane keeping.

Kumar is zeroing in on eliminating traffic lights from intersections or making them more effective. To do this, cars will have to communicate with each other and the traffic lights so they can intelligently direct traffic.

Kumar predicts with limited funding it would take two years for such a system to be on the market.

UK Drivers Skittish on Driverless Cars U.K.-based insurance firm Be Wiser Insurance found in a poll that more than two-thirds of British motorists are uncomfortable with the notion of sharing the road with driverless cars.

Sixty-eight percent of poll takers reported being uncomfortable while 32 percent favored it, citing human judgment flaws that lead to accidents.

“Reducing the potential for human error could make for a safer driving experience — especially when it comes to those little bumps and scrapes which occur when momentary distraction is to blame. A computer rarely loses concentration,” says Mark Bower-Dyke, chairman of Be Wiser Insurance.

Concerns among those that said they were uncomfortable driving near self-driving vehicles included who would be responsible in an accident and whether driverless cars could be trusted more than a standard computer.

that driverless cars will be the logical end of safer driving, especially for those who don’t like or enjoy driving at all.”

Many respondents to the poll also keyed in on one gray area that would exist with driverless car passengers — the ability to drink alcohol before getting in the car.

“Driverless cars could provide real safety advantages when there are enough of them on the road,” says Bower-Dyke. “It’s not all about having a robot chauffeur to drive you back from the pub.”

Advanced Navigation Releases Triple-Tech Spatial Fog Australia’s Advanced Navigation has released Spatial Fog, a spoof-proof enhanced GPS system that can also operate in areas where GPS is weak or nonexistent.

Spatial Fog combines a GPS receiver with KVH Industries’ 1750 inertial measurement unit, allowing the system to fall back on inertial navigation if GPS isn’t available. However, the system also uses receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) to prevent spoofing, which could be a problem if someone tries to electronically hijack a self-driving car.

“RAIM works by analyzing multiple satellite signals and developing a statistical model of the observed versus expected signals,” the company says. “From this model it is able to determine if there is a fault with the signals it is receiving.”

Combing all three systems makes the system good for safety-conscious autonomous vehicles, the company says.

Advanced Navigation’s Spatial Fog. Photo courtesy the company.

“Automated parking is already being hailed as a boon to both drivers and insurers as it reduces the number of parking related claims,” Bower-Dyke says. “We hope MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

5

esting, legislating and implementing driverless cars has been increasingly high profile in places all around the world. Here’s a look at a few of the locations that have gained notoriety in the self-driving car and vehicle sector as of late.

R

E AM

NTO, CALIF.

AN

Worldwide ROADTRIP T

N

AR

The University of Michigan is hosting a Department of Transportation pilot program to test vehicleto-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure integration in preparation for a possible national decision on the technology.

N

SA C

California is the latest state to adopt a bill about driverless cars, though many more states are waiting in the wings to do so. The law was enacted in a public signing ceremony by Gov. Jerry Brown and was attended by Google’s Sergey Brin, who also spoke at the event in September 2012.

RRE A W

6

MISSION CRITICAL

•

Nevada became the first state to pass driverless car legislation in 2011.

The milestone gave companies the green light to test the technology in the state. So far, Google, Continental and Audi have received licenses.

May 2013

,

V.

LAHASS EE TAL

CARS

ON

M O U NT AI

Google continues to dominate driverless car discussions, with more than 400,000 miles driven to date.

DriverlessCarHQ.com predicts the company will top the 1 million mile mark this year.

C

N , MI CH.

In February, the U.S. Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center and Lockheed Martin demonstrated a satellitecontrolled Squad Mission Support System platform in a unique take on how autonomous vehicles could be operated.

CALIF. EW, I V

, NE Y T I

BO R, MICH .

FL

A.

Florida became the second state to regulate driverless cars. The law requires that humans be ready to intervene if necessary, and testers must have $5 million in insurance coverage.

STATE OF THE ART

D, U.K. FOR X O

ER

, SWE D E

DEN

LL

After a series of road train tests, the Safe Road Trains for the Environment test

by Ricardo UK on Volvo vehicles was declared a success. The program demonstrated a road-training concept, where cars follow a leader vehicle, and it displayed how the method cuts down on emissions.

HÄ

S, SWITZ ER L

AN

CU

N BLE

Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne is testing autonomous shuttles that will be used on campus to transport up to eight people at a time. The vehicles, which are made by French company Induct, can travel up to 20 kpm.

E

University of Oxford is working on a driverless Nissan Leaf that wouldn’t use GPS or 3-D sensors to function.

The car uses an Oxford-created computer system to drive and has an iPad interface for the driver.

A

D

,

LY A T I

PILB

AR

PAR M

Researchers from the University of Parma took part in a 2010 project to drive autonomously from Italy to China.

Speaking at a recent conference, Dr. Alberto Broggi said the vehicle sensed using lidar but had no integrated maps.

A

USTR A ,

ALIA

Mining company Rio Tinto is using autonomous vehicles to work iron ore mines as part of the company’s Mine of the Future concept.

The company also uses autonomous trains.

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

7

Driverless Convoys and Carrying Cargo: Robotics Lighten the Load

By Brett Davis

A

utomated technology in the military arena is proceeding along a variety of fronts, as several companies around the world are seeking to lighten the loads of soldiers or keep them out of logistics convoys.

Lockheed Martin is working on both fronts. With the AutoMate Convoy Module, a bolt-on system of hardware and software that can convert military trucks into remote-controlled or self-driving vehicles, it is seeking to minimize the number of soldiers who need to be present in convoys.

That’s feeding into the U.S. Army’s AMAS program, which stands for Autonomous Mobility Applique System, a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration effort that’s intended to become a program of record.

Driving convoys in warzones is necessary to resupply soldiers in the field, but it’s a hazardous duty, and convoys are a favorite victim of the signature weapon of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device.

“You could conceivably have a very small number of soldiers devoted to driving,” says Joe Zinecker, Lockheed Martin’s director of combat maneuver systems at the Missiles and Fire Control division. “The system has the capability to get that down to zero. The lead vehicle could be unmanned. You could, in theory, have no soldiers driving 8

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

it whatsoever,” although he admits that’s a little way off.

The appliqué system that will make up AMAS grew out of CAST, the Convoy Active Safety Technology system effort started in 2005 by the Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise and the Army’s Tank Automotive Research and Development Engineering Center.

That in turn grew out of the Autonomous Land Vehicle, or ALV, a hulking, 10-foot-tall self-driving vehicle developed in 1985 by DARPA and what was then Martin Marietta (in fact, some of the ALV engineers work on the AutoMate Module program today).

By the time CAST wrapped up in 2011, it had driven more than 16,000 miles autonomously with no mishaps with convoys of as many as five vehicles.

However, the CAST software was “written by engineers for engineers,” Zinecker says, and anything headed into the field needs to be easier to fit on various types of vehicles and be “much more maintainable.”

That’s the goal of the appliqué kit for AMAS, which is still in the laboratory at the moment. The first field tests are scheduled for this summer. The company plans to set up convoy tests, where vehicles must not only avoid obstacles but other vehicles attempting to interfere with them, just as they would in the field.

Self-driving trucks take to the road as part of the CAST demonstration.

Photo courtesy Lockheed Martin.

AMAS is intended to be “an autonomy kit coupled with a by-wire kit that can be fitted to almost any vehicle,” Zinecker says.

It consists of TV cameras, scanners, radars, lidars and a laser scanner, along with actuators that can operate the brakes, steering column and active safety kit.

“So, basically with the AMAS system, you have an option of turning on the active safety kit that gives warnings to the driver … [and it] ranges all the way up to full autonomy,” Zinecker says.

Competition on the Road Lockheed Martin is far from alone in the appliqué robotic kit space, although it may have been in it longer than many competitors.

TORC Robotics, based in Virginia, markets three levels of drive-by-wire kits that allow vehicle functions to be monitored and controlled remotely or even allow the vehicles to drive autonomously.

Utah-based Kairos Autonomi markets the Pronto4 appliqué kit that converts vehicles into optionally manned ones. It recently wrapped up the first phase of contract work installing kits to create unmanned target vehicles for National Guard Bureau test sites across the country.

Switzerland’s Ruag Defence showed a new concept for robotic vehicle control, VERO, at the IDEX international defense exhibition in Abu Dhabi in February (for more on that show, see the April issue of Unmanned Systems). The company has developed the appliqué kit for the Swiss army Eagle IV military vehicle, allowing it to be driven by a human or operated remotely, but it can be retrofitted to existing vehicles.

The company is planning VERO in three phases: remote control via radio link by the end of 2013; semiautonomous control in 2014, meaning preplanned courses could be programmed into the system; and autonomous operation after that.

Oshkosh Defense also has its TerraMax kit, which can convert military vehicles into unmanned systems. Like AutoMate, it’s a system of software and sensors that can connect to the drive-by-wire systems of military trucks. The company has wrapped up a demonstration conducted with the Robotics Technology Consortium and is now upgrading the system with new computing smarts.

It’s also a bit of a celebrity, having made an appearance on a recent episode of the BBC’s car-nut show “Top Gear,” where it took part in a cross-country race against show host James May. MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

9

A convoy of TerraMax vehicles.

Photo courtesy Oshkosh Defense.

Robotic Porters Military self-driving systems aren’t limited to large trucks. Soldiers and Marines also need smaller systems to carry their gear on patrol, and several companies are working on systems that can be remotely operated or drive themselves.

Lockheed Martin has the Squad Mission Support System (SMSS), an off-the-shelf, all-terrain vehicle converted into a sophisticated robot. The system can be driven by radio control or in autonomous mode.

Soldiers can use the satellite link to control the system remotely to conduct a mission. Then when it’s done, they can just switch it back to autonomous mode and have it come home.

The company is now developing different variants of the system with an eye toward a program of record in 2015. The company is also exploring cooperation with

Four units were tested in Afghanistan last year by the U.S. Army. The soldiers were reluctant to give them back, Zinecker says. “They really did not want the vehicles to come home.”

One new wrinkle for the SMSS is satellite connectivity, which the company demonstrated on the vehicle.

That allows it to be controlled almost anywhere in the world with only half a second of latency, adequate for the generally slow speeds at which the vehicle operates.

The Squad Mission Support System, an off-road vehicle turned into a robot and capable of very long distance control via satellite. Photo courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Click this QR code to see a preview of Oshkosh Defense’s TerraMax on “Top Gear.”

10

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Orlando2013_Rotor_ad_LISA_REV_Layout 6 4/3/13 10:49 AM Page 1

the unmanned K-Max cargo helicopter program, which tackles the unmanned logistics problem from the air.

“We are planning on doing some cooperative work with the K-Max guys this summer,” says Adrian Michalicek, program development manager for autonomous systems at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “If you’ve got an SMSS vehicle and you want to run a reconnaissance mission, you don’t necessarily want to drive it there.”

• Explore the latest in airborne technology, tactics & techniques.

• Learn from a one-ofa-kind educational lineup during preconference courses & conference classes.

• Network with pilots, TFOs, technicians & managers.

TORC Robotics’ GUSS, shown here at the 2012 Robotics Rodeo. AUVSI photo.

As with the larger systems, they aren’t alone in developing this capability.

TORC Robotics has been working with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and other agencies on the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate, or GUSS, also a commercial off-road vehicle converted to robotics use. GUSS can carry about 1,800 pounds of cargo, a bit more than SMSS, and can also be driven via teleoperation or drive autonomously.

GUSS recently took part in the 2012 Robotics Rodeo at Fort Benning, Ga., sponsored by TARDEC and the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, where it took first place in the mounted endurance challenge. The company ran GUSS in autonomous mode in that competition, which tested the speed, reliability and endurance of machines over rough terrain.

Israel Aerospace Industries is developing Rex, a fourwheeled robotic porter for infantry. It’s smaller than GUSS or SMSS, carrying up to 551 pounds of gear.

As all of these programs continue, and others join them, it seems clear that that future of battlefield transportation will be increasingly unmanned.

Brett Davis is editor of Unmanned Systems.

ALEA is the only organization dedicated to education, training & networking for public safety aviation.

Register Now

www.alea.org MISSION CRITICAL

301.631.2406 •

May 2013

11

Uncanny valley

Rules$ of the Road L

States Line Up for Driverless Car Dollars

egislation on driverless cars has the distinction of being both a right of passage for a state interested in allowing self-driving vehicles on its roads, while also — as many states have admitted — being somewhat unnecessary.

Currently only Nevada, Florida and California have legislation allowing the testing of driverless cars on their roads. But, with a large push from Google, many other states are coming to the fore to stay ahead of the pledge by many auto manufacturers to have commercial selfdriving cars on the road by around 2020.

Other states that have proposed legislation include Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon, along with the District of Columbia, to name a few.

California, which passed driverless car legislation in Senate Bill 1298 in September 2012, acknowledged in its bill language that driverless cars were not explicitly prohibited in any laws already on the books. In fact, Google did the lion’s share of its more than 400,000 self-driven miles in the company’s home state prior to the bill’s passage.

The same is true for pending legislation state Michigan.

As of June 2012, speaking at AUVSI’s Driverless Car Summit 2012 in Michigan, the state’s Director of the Department of Transportation Kirk Steudle believed that despite a lack of legislation, testing self-driving cars was still legal.

“We don’t think there’s a prohibition right now.”

But, regardless, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder took up the issue in his State of the State address in January 2013, and State Sen. Mike Kowall introduced legislation on the issue on 7 Feb. So if legality is not holding driverless cars back, what’s with all these states clamoring over being the next to have driverless car bills? A simple answer is money, particularly for Michigan, which prides itself as the United States’ hub of motor vehicles and relies on auto manufacturer dollars to stay in the state.

12

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Kowall explained to The Car Connection that automotive supplier Continental expressed desire to relocate to Nevada after that state, the first to pass legislation, came up with a licensing process for self-driving vehicles.

Though there’s no timeline for Michigan to pass legislation, nearby states are ramping up efforts to get a slice of what is traditionally the Wolverine State’s pie.

State Sen. Fred Risser’s proposed driverless car bill would mean nearby Wisconsin, not Michigan, could be the first Midwestern state that allows driverless car testing.

His bill was proposed in February of this year.

States that don’t have a direct financial tie to the automotive industry are pitching driverless car bills to their constituents for alternative reasons. Oregon State Rep. Sara Gelser, who introduced House Bill 2428 in January, says driverless cars tie into her prior interests of helping people with disabilities to stay empowered through mobility. Oregon also currently has laws that do actually prohibit driverless vehicles.

“Our legislation does require that there is [a] driver in the car that is sitting [in] the driver’s seat, who is [a] licensed driver,” said Gelser in an interview with NPR. “The standards that we are proposing in this bill would require that there be an override feature on the car. So if there is a problem, that licensed driver that is required to be in the driver’s seat could take control of the vehicle.”

Another major factor in passing legislation is technology giant Google. Oregon would give the company three connected and massive states in which to take their vehicles on a road trip. And it seems when it comes to state legislation that whatever Google says goes.

The one anomaly in all the passed, proposed and pending legislation comes from Colorado, which shelved its driverless car bill, sponsored by State Sen. Greg Brophy.

According to a statement by Brophy in the Denver Post, the bill got stuck because of objections by Google. Brophy said the company had “reservations,” but wouldn’t comment on further questioning by the paper.

Technology Gap

Driving Down the Cost of Change A

t last year’s Driverless Car Summit in Detroit, Google’s Chris Urmson said the company’s selfdriving cars have $150,000 of equipment on board, including a $70,000 lidar. And while that price for a prototype driverless car system created by a company with nearly $11 billion in profits last year isn’t worth a second glance, it would amount to sticker shock for the average consumer already dropping a lot of cash on a new car.

“Right now a lot of these systems are in the prototype phase, and so the hardware that’s being purchased is either a one- or two-off, low-volume [production] price, so that adds up as you go through any vehicle outfit with the required sensing technology, computing technology and things like that,” says Ryan Lamm, manager of research and development for intelligent vehicle systems at Southwest Research Institute.

Southwest has first-hand experience in how to bring down the cost of sensor technology. The research firm is the prime contractor in the Navy’s Small Unit Mobility Enhancement Technologies program, which aims to make unmanned ground vehicle technology capable yet also affordable. While Southwest Research Institute doesn’t produce sensor hardware, it worked to develop low-cost camera algorithms for vehicles that don’t rely on GPS data. And though this program has a military focus, Lamm says the concept translates to the driverless car community.

“It actually translates quite well. ... A lot of the expertise and a lot of the secret sauce really is the software. And so the way we’ve developed a lot of the systems is to pretty much be agnostic of sensors, to not be dependent on specific types of platforms, to not be dependent on any specific type of hardware.”

Like any other product, mass production will likely shrink the cost of driverless car sensors, since it will change how they are manufactured and also increase competition, which also drives down cost. However, Lamm says there are keys that will also enable software prices to remain low, like keeping nonrecurring costs down through use of an extensible software framework.

“Our philosophy is always that the software should be very modular, scalable and extensible so that you don’t

The SUMET EV-1 vehicle, which can navigate autonomously in harsh terrain.

Photo courtesy Southwest Research Institute.

have to redo a lot of software when you want to add additional levels of autonomy or make changes to your hardware,” he says.

Through this approach to making autonomy software, the cost of updates is “essentially free” after you’ve developed the initial framework, says Lamm.

However, Southwest Research Institute isn’t a for-profit corporation trying to sell shrink-wrapped autonomy software. Many companies do license their software for royalties, just like how personal computer users pay for adding software to their systems. A model like this could mean that the overall cost of going driverless would be higher.

Modular, scalable software development also allows companies to keep up with Moore’s Law — the concept that the rate of computing power change over short time intervals is exponential.

“One of the key goals of all the work that we’ve done at [Southwest Research Institute], including some of the internally funded work that we’ve done, is to look at what’s possible to eliminate dependence on expensive, vendor-proprietary solutions,” says Lamm. “We don’t build our systems around specific types of vehicles and what have you. By being extensible, what that does is it effectively takes the software cost factor, for slight modification or enhancements, out of the equation. So really then what you’re dependent upon in the end is the cost of the hardware.”

The ultimate driver of price, however, is still the consumer. “What we’ve seen in the auto market is safety is a difficult sell,” says Lamm. “If you’re going to buy a new car, if you have the option for an entertainment package versus a special additional safety system, it’s likely that the end consumer will choose the entertainment package over the safety system. … This is a feature that’s going to cost several thousand dollars, possibly, and is the public willing to pay that the next time they go out and buy their next car? Or is the convenience, the mobility aspect of being able to be distracted while you’re sitting in your vehicle, is that worth that cost to you? It’ll be interesting to see how the market evolves.”

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

13

Q&A:

Tom Bamonte

Tom Bamonte serves as the general counsel for the North Texas Tollway Authority. Over the past five years he’s written articles and made presentations to legal and transportation industry groups on driverless and driver-assisted technology. He maintains a Twitter site devoted to the technology (@TomBamonte) and is a contributor to Driverless Car HQ.

Q: What are the major legal hurdles you see on the horizon for self-driving car technology?

A: I’m actually an optimist in this area and am confident that the legal system will be capable of handling liability issues arising from this technology, just has it with all sorts of new technologies over the past century.

There is a risk of overregulation where folks, primarily the federal government, may prematurely come in and attempt to occupy the field and slow the rapid pace of innovation in this area. But overall, I’m optimistic that our legal system can handle this technology without any significant reconfiguration or major changes.

Q: How do you think the issue of privacy will come to play in connected vehicle and connected infrastructure debates?

A: We in the toll industry have a lot of experience dealing with highway users and privacy. What we’ve learned is this: Users are very concerned about having data about their individual travel patterns shared. We don’t get a lot of resistance, however, to us harvesting data from travel patterns as a whole to improve safety, traffic management, etc. As long as connected vehicle technology is used for general data harvesting, as opposed to tracking individual drivers, we’ve set a good example in the toll industry of how to find an acceptable balance.

Q: In what ways do you imagine cities changing once driverless cars become a ubiquitous technology?

A: There’s been some work in this area suggesting that driverless vehicle technology will promote sprawl. I think the opposite may be true. More efficient use of existing highway space, which is what this technology offers, allows cities to have more density around their existing highway networks. What that means is that if you could double, triple, even quadruple the carrying capacity of ex14

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

isting streets, and especially expressways, you could have denser retail and residential development around our existing highway system. So I see this technology as a way to densify urban development, as opposed to it being something that will further promote sprawl.

Q: Many states, with varying transportation needs and population densities, are looking into passing driverless car legislation. Do you have an opinion on how different regions with different densities should take these types of factors into account when writing driverless car legislation?

A: I don’t think the law needs to reflect the different levels of density and urban development in our states. We’re early enough in the development curve that just getting vehicles out there to be tested, and have the highway authorities and cities and states working in this area, is what we need. We’re all going to figure it out together.

At this point I think it’d be premature to have a different driverless vehicle law for, say, Montana or Wyoming versus Connecticut or another densely populated state.

Q: What immediate benefits do you foresee in creating the proper infrastructure for selfdriving or connected vehicles?

A: There are opportunities to facilitate the deployment of driverless and connected vehicle technologies by selected infrastructure improvements. On expressways, for example, could the road communicate useful information to vehicles in such a way that we could have driverless vehicle lanes that provide guaranteed travel times from point to point?

On the safety side, there may be ways for the infrastructure to talk to vehicles to disable cars that are going in a wrong-way direction. Wrong-way vehicles cause a lot of damage, a lot of accidents, and there could be a way

Q&A for the infrastructure to communicate to the wrongway vehicles and pull them to the shoulder until law enforcement can arrive. We could save hundreds of lives each year.

Q: Infrastructure changes are often costly. Do you see the cost benefit as worthwhile versus implementing changes only to a vehicle’s onboard technology?

we enhance that technology just through better striping? Are there ways to make vehicles, guardrails and other highway features visually more resonant to lidar, infrared and photo sensors? One of the things we can and should be doing right now is considering how do we remake the look of our roadways using existing elements so that driverless and connected vehicles can operate more effectively and safely.

Beyond that, we’re all waiting on the federal governA: I think it’s premature to willy-nilly invest in driver- ment to move on the 5.9-gigahertz wireless spectrum. less vehicle technology infrastructure. Frankly, most of If we finally get that as an established standard, we can it hasn’t been invented yet. The challenge that we face as talk about developing sensors that broadcast road condihighway authorities is, at some point, as the driverless ve- tion information and upcoming traffic information and hicle technology gets more sophisticated, we’re going to stoplight technology that alerts vehicles to another vehicle that’s going to run a light. need to have some pretty fundamental discussions about ‘We’re in the equivalent of the early Those kind investments could be good ones in the relative whether we want to increase roadway capacity through in- 1900s. They didn’t wait back then near term. vesting in electronic platforms versus pouring more concrete and expanding our physical facilities.

for the interstate highway system to deploy the Model T. They put the Model T out there on the dirt roads, and when it rained the horse did better. Yet, it was the release of new vehicular technology that prompted the development of paved roads and ultimately the interstates. A similar process is happening now.’

I think that what makes sense from a cost-benefit analysis now is for cities and highway authorities to partner up with the auto manufacturers; other innovators, such as Google in this area; and local research institutions to figure out exactly what does a highway of the future look like. That future highway is probably based on wireless communications and involves a fiberoptic backbone, both of which we have already in some form. There’s probably a generation of sensors that allow communications between vehicles and infrastructure.

Again, a lot of it remains to be invented, so what we need to do now is invest in that research and work together on some visioning and hopefully some solutions.

Q: What are examples of simple infrastructure solutions cities could implement that better enable driverless cars?

A: Here’s something that we’re already thinking about: Do you paint your roadways differently so that sensor-equipped vehicles can read the roadway more effectively? Existing vehicles now are coming equipped with lane-changing technologies, where the vehicle alerts you if you’re steering out of your lane. Could

Q: How can cities better prepare themselves for driverless cars that could soon be coming to their roads?

A: At this point what’s needed is for folks to identify the upsides and downsides of the technology and use local, regional, state and federal resources to try to figure out ways to facilitate the deployment of autonomous and connected vehicle technology.

We’re in the equivalent of the early 1900s. They didn’t wait back then for the interstate highway system to deploy the Model T. They put the Model T out there on the dirt roads, and when it rained the horse did better.

Yet, it was the release of new vehicular technology that prompted the development of paved roads and ultimately the interstates. A similar process is happening now. Google and other innovators are going to be putting the driverless vehicles out there on “dumb” 20th century infrastructure. It’s going to take a while for the infrastructure to catch up with “smart” cars, just as it took a while for the interstate highway system to catch up with the descendents of the Model T. That’s where I see us going. The key question is what’s the infrastructure platform that will make the onboard driverless/ connected vehicle technology work more effectively and more safely?

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

15

T

he last 30 years of driverless car advances have often been propelled by federal projects that advanced the state of the art. Here’s a look at the stages of projects both in the United States and abroad that have focused on self-driving technology.

1994 – The Prometheus Project gained ground when two robotic vehicles drove at speeds up to 130 kph for more than 1,000 kilometers in Paris on a highway.

1987 – Pan-European research and development organization EUREKA introduced the Prometheus Project in 1987, a large-scale driverless car development program.

1996 – European CHAUFFEUR project begins, focused on “electronic towbar” operations to enable platooning of trucks.

1996 – Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism demonstrates fully automated vehicles on public roads.

1994 – The National Automated Highway System Consortium is set up to carry out the automated highway demonstration called for in the 1991 ISTEA bill.

16

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

2004 – The first DARPA Grand Challenge is held in the Mojave Desert. No team finished the event.

2003 – California DOT funds UC-Berkeley PATH program to develop and assess truck platooning technologies.

1997 –The NAHSC hosts the Automated Highway Systems demonstration in San Diego, where thousands of participants were given rides in automated cars, trucks and buses.

TIMELINE

2009 – German KONVOI project, begun in 2005, completes testing of truck platoons on public roads.

2005 – DARPA reconvened for a new Grand Challenge, carrying over the prize money from the original event.

This time all but one competitor completed the race.

2013 – Japanese Energy ITS project holds major capability demonstration.

2009 – The SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project had the dual goals of enabling driverless road training and also cutting down on environmental effluence from automobiles through reduced congestion.

2008 – Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry begins the Energy ITS project to reduce emissions via truck platooning.

2007 – DARPA’s Urban Challenge followed its more rural counterparts with a more suburban scenario track at George Air Force Base. Six teams successfully completed the mission.

2012 – The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began the largest ever test of connected vehicle technology.

2012 – After completing public road tests earlier in the year, SARTRE successfully wrapped up in mid-November.

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

17

DRIVING THE MARKET Auto Companies Vie for Unmanned Dominance

By Paul Godsmark and Gabriel Sniman

Driverless Car HQ projects that Google will hit the million-mile mark with its driverless cars this year. Photo courtesy Google.

Editor’s note: The following report on the commercial driverless car industry was contributed by the writers of Driverless Car HQ, an Australia-based website dedicated to driverless car news coverage. All opinions expressed belong to Driverless Car HQ.

J

ust a couple of years ago, if you were to tell someone that fully autonomous cars could be on the road by 2020, you would have been laughed at.

A few years back companies like GM, BMW and Mercedes were clearly on a slow but steady course toward the ultimate goal of unmanned driving. Ford released selfparking technology for the masses and other improvements steadily found their way into the ecosystem, but no one was even talking openly about autonomous technology as a thing for the immediate future. Universities and Google seemed to be simply getting on with their development programs, with the indication being that consumers would still need to wait decades to see this technology become road-bound. Only GM had dared to suggest, with deliberately vague terminology, that consumers might see this technology in the 2020s.

Fast forward a couple of years and the latest competition seems to be about who will be first with fully autonomous systems. The race is hot and growing hotter still.

In 2012, GM, Volvo, Lexus, Nissan and BMW/Continental indicated that by around 2020 they will have autonomous technology in their vehicles. Mercedes-Benz has emphatically stated that it will be first and has plans

18

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

to release a semiautonomous vehicle in the latter part of 2013. Volvo plans to do it by 2014. Google has stated openly and repeatedly that its technology could be in public hands as soon as 2017. Do planners and politicians, businesses and the public have any idea quite what this means and how to use the next four years to prepare?

The Current State of Play Three companies have now been licensed by Nevada, the first state to introduce regulations. Google received the first infinity license plate “001” from Nevada, with Continental following with “007.” Following this, Audi became the first automaker to gain an infinity plate.

The race certainly seems to be heating up. Michigan has made it very clear that it now wants autonomous vehicle laws, thus following Nevada, Florida, California and impending legislation in Texas.

The North American automakers have traditionally seen Michigan as the center for automotive development.

Yet, times are changing. Nissan has challenged the status quo by moving its autonomous research center to Silicon Valley in California, because that is where the artificial intelligence expertise key to this technology located.

If Google truly is ahead because of its AI expertise, then this makes sense. Improving cars is increasingly becoming a software problem, rather than hardware. Where else but Silicon Valley?

But, despite all this, the automakers still seem intent on following their 130-year-old, tried-and-true business

model of incremental improvements, currently moving to semiautonomous technology with plans to, at some point, offer full autonomy if people really want it. Many automakers still insist that the goal is not unmanned driving, but assisted driving that relieves the pressure from humans when they need it. But, with statistics showing that young people are gaining their licenses at an increasingly older age and less and less are choosing to own a car, it seems that driving has become an irritating distraction for many.

For some, it takes away valuable time from social media and Internet browsing in general — the growing addiction of this second decade of the 21st century.

Google Domination?

safer than a human being. None of the automakers have released figures on miles tested on public roads, although Audi and Continental needed to achieve at least 10,000 miles to satisfy Nevada’s licensing requirements.

Bridging Technology Gaps

Lidar seems to be Google’s silver bullet in achieving these advances so quickly. Many observers see lidar as the gold-standard technology if you want to achieve as close as possible to 100 percent confidence of object recognition. Of the automakers, Driverless Car HQ has seen Velodyne’s spinning lidar on GM and Toyota vehicles (for more information, see Page 16 of the winter 2012 Mission Critical: Sensors issue).

Audi and Continental are likely using German company Ibeo’s much smaller lidar units or similar sensors.

Automakers have yet to publicly demonstrate the level of autonomy shown in DARPA’s 2007

So, is Google ahead of the automakers? Through Driverless Car HQ’s own research, mostly assisted

by Google’s own search engine, we have counted 28 California-plated Urban Challenge. Photo courtesy DARPA. self-driving cars, including eight Toyota Prius vehicles and 22 Lexus RX450hs, in addition to several in Nevada. So common are they that many commuters around the Bay Area have informed Driverless Car HQ reporters that they see the Google driverless cars on a weekly basis.

In August Google announced on its official blog that its vehicles had completed more than 300,000 miles on public roads. In September Google had completed more than 50,000 miles consecutively without any safety critical human intervention. Now, with 30 vehicles on the road and a fleet that is rapidly expanding, the quantity of miles driven is set to balloon.

Driverless Car HQ expects Google to reach the magic million-mile figure at some point around mid 2013. This number is significant, given the claim of Stanford’s Bryant Walker Smith that Google would need 727,000 miles without human intervention to demonstrate that there is 99 percent confidence that their vehicle will be

There have been some impressive results with the vision-based systems from Mercedes and BMW, but it is clear that the technical gap to fully autonomous driving cannot currently be bridged using vision alone. There may well be breakthroughs in this area in the next few years, but at the moment anyone that is serious about fully autonomous functionality has to be using a lidar-based system.

In many ways the public progress announced by the automakers has been impressive, with selfparking Audis and Toyotas fitted with intelligent transportation system technology traveling autonomously around the company’s test track.

Mercedes, Volvo and BMW are all on the cusp of releasing semiautonomous technology which will handle a high proportion of the driving workload in certain prescribed driving environments, either at low speed when congested or at high speed on freeways.

But, and it is a big but, the automakers have not demonstrated anything publicly that approaches MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

19

Mercedes-Benz vehicle-to-vehicle LED collision warning system. Many commercial car companies have been debuting driver-assist technology in a ramp up to eventual driverless cars. Photo courtesy Mercedes-Benz.

the level of autonomy shown by the entrants to the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007. All successful entrants to the DARPA challenges used lidar-based systems, and many of those engineers have moved onto working with Google and the automakers. It could be that the automakers are significantly more advanced than they have publicly declared, but if that is the case then why let Google undercut the date at which they can provide full autonomy?

Google has been talking about retrofitting driverless car technology onto existing vehicles. A draft of the proposed autonomous vehicle bill for the District of Columbia refers to retrofitting vehicles manufactured in 2009 or later.

Motivating the Consumer The driverless car community has heard the discussions about major, show-stopping obstacles, such as liability, legal, union resistance, unwillingness to hand over control to a robot, cybersecurity, etc. But perhaps the tipping point will be when an average person can save a significant portion of their salary by not owning a car.

Furthermore, the main motivator for self-driving cars 20

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

will be the millions of lives saved by this technology.

Human error is a factor in 93 percent of the approximate 1.2 million road fatalities that occur worldwide every year.

There are massive downsides too — taxi drivers and freight truckers may soon be out of a job. However, with every great industrial and technological revolution, there is turmoil and employment displacement. Driverless Car HQ anticipates, however, that many of the people who are displaced will move into the new industries created by this technology. For example, someone will need to build, maintain and manage all those driverless delivery bots. And although this may be a disruptive technology, millions of lives will be saved and countless more injuries and accidents avoided. For us at Driverless Car HQ, it can’t come soon enough.

Paul Godsmark is a highway safety expert who now consults on self-driving car issues for regional governments. He and Gabriel Sniman are both part of the writing team at DriverlessCarHQ. To visit the website, go to www.driverlesscarhq.com or contact Editor Matt Newton at contact@ driverlesscarhq.com.

THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS INTEGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES The Federal Aviation Administration currently has heavy restrictions on unmanned aircraft flying in the nation’s airspace. In a recently released economic report, AUVSI explores the economic implications to the United States once these restrictions are lifted.

Congress has set a 2015 September 30 deadline for this integration.

Bottom line, a multibillion commercial market will quickly emerge in the United States with applications ranging from precision agriculture to precision taco delivery, creating more than 100,000 jobs by 2025 just in manufacturing for these new products.

WHY UAS? In the most basic sense, UAS allow for similar capabilities of manned aircraft except without the added weight and size of the pilot and related pilot protection equipment. In the report, AUVSI focused on markets that have existing data (agriculture and public safety)

and made projections. However, when it comes to new applications, soon the sky will no longer be the limit.

LEGISLATIVE BARRIERS Though the FAA will find safe, effective ways to integrate UAS in the nation’s airspace, lifting what is the only current hurdle to mass commercial adoption, new legislation is under development that will may hinder commercial adoption of UAS. Michael Toscano, president and CEO of AUVSI, recently spoke to US Congress on the matter. Looking purely at the economic implications, states or municipalities that limit UAS use will miss out on the benefits of such systems and will likely quickly change their ways after other states prove out the potential of UAS and alleviate current concerns. However, it may be too late for states that adapt slowly, as companies will likely already be established in states without excess restrictions.

TO READ THE FULL REPORT ONLINE, SCAN THIS QR CODE OR VISIT

http://www.auvsi.org/econreport MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

23

The national test beds available to developers today.

Image courtesy U.S. Department of Transportation.

Michigan’s Connected Vehicle Test Bed V2 V AND V2I T ECHNOL OGY A K E Y E N A B LE R

By David A. McNamara

A

utomated driving — the ability of the car to drive itself — has captured the imagination.

J.D. Power and Associates, the premier automotive market researcher, recently conducted a consumer study indicating that one out of five consumers would purchase an automated vehicle. The connected automated car using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-toinfrastructure wireless creates new possibilities and is the future of transportation.

Scientific Application International Corp., under contract by the U.S. Department of Transportation, operates the Connected Vehicle Test Bed in Novi, Mich., to test V2I applications that enhance safety and mobility.

The CVTB and its resources were used by the developers of the technologies used in the Safety Pilot Model Deployment in Ann Arbor, Mich., to develop, test, and certify hardware and software and prove the interoperability of those devices. The SPMD is a large-scale field operations test of 2,900 vehicles that is being used to study the effectiveness of V2V safety applications.

22

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Testing the Technology When will the safety and mobility benefits of the driverless car be realized? Transportation industry insiders predict that existing driver assistance systems will become conditionally automated — that is, an automated copilot will take control under certain conditions. Existing radar- and camera-based systems can operate autonomously at lower speeds, under 35 mph. Volvo plans to put its version of this system, Traffic Assist, on the road as early as 2014. Richard Wallace, director of Transportation Systems Analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, follows these developments closely with an eye toward assessing readiness.

“Vehicle automation at lower speeds is ready today,” he says. “Our study of the driverless car landscape tells us that these early systems will build on current, state-ofthe-art radar and electro-optical [camera] technologies.

We have the opportunity to provide drivers with both added comfort and improved traffic throughput in congested corridors.”

Testing Testing The industry can address many technical questions once it characterizes complex driving environments and provides real-life test environments. One key question unique to automated driving is the handoff from driver to the automated copilot and vice versa. Other technical questions include testing to interoperability standards and system and component robustness under real-life road conditions. This experience and feedback from developers underscores the importance of a test environment that emulates real-world road conditions — weather, radio reception, road type, urban intersections and geography — and gives developers the freedom to configure tests.

Methodology in Michigan The Connected Vehicle Test Bed is where new V2I applications can be created, tested and deployed on a large scale. A compelling application the project is considering is “green wave” — the ability of cars, and especially commercial trucks, to avoid unnecessary braking and to maximize fuel efficiency. Cars and trucks communicate with intersections and precisely interpret traffic signal timing to control speeds at a safe and optimum speed.

Developers can come to Michigan’s Telegraph Road portion of the Connected Vehicle Test Bed to experience these new applications. The Michigan Connected Vehicle Test Bed is comprised of more than 75 centerline miles of roadway. Roadside Equipment (RSE) can also broadcast Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) and Geometric Intersection Description along Telegraph Road.

The Michigan test bed is representative of several others throughout the U.S. that are open to developers. Assets include RSEs meeting national standards located on various roads and intersections; SPaT broadcasts; test vehicles dedicated for research and development; portable SPaT listeners, along with dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) sniffer capabilities; and custom, portable, solar-powered trailers for deploying RSEs in targeted locations.

Leveraging Wireless Technology Wireless technology is a key enabler of the automated car, because it enhances safety and mobility, but what wireless technologies should be used? Many safety applications require low-latency (e.g., an air bag deployment decision is in the low millisecond range) and deterministic communications. The U.S. DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has chosen DSRC, a Wi-Fi based technology, for new V2V and V2I applications that require low-latency and short-range

communications. Cellular is capable of a longer range of communication, while DSRC is so short range that it could warn drivers of incidents immediately ahead.

How should these wireless technologies be integrated for safety and mobility?

The Role of Connected Car Technology New V2V wireless technology allows cars to communicate to other cars, sharing important information and taking automotive safety to the next level. Consumers expect the automated vehicle to employ the latest safety technology, and, therefore, existing driver assistance systems will be enhanced by the capabilities of V2V technology. With the addition of wireless, driver assistance systems become cooperative systems.

According to the DOT website, “Connected vehicle safety applications are designed to increase situational awareness and reduce or eliminate crashes through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure data transmission that supports driver advisories, driver warnings and vehicle and/or infrastructure controls. These technologies may potentially address up to 82 percent of crash scenarios with unimpaired drivers, preventing tens of thousands of automobile crashes every year.“ The Michigan safety pilot has the goal of characterizing and quantifying the safety benefits. (For more information on the field operation, see the February 2013 edition of Unmanned Systems.)

Volvo has demonstrated conditional automated driving, or “platooning,” in the European Safe Road Trains for the Environment Project, or SARTRE. Platooning employs radar, cameras and wireless for communication between vehicles. The military has recognized the benefits and will be the first adopter.

Vehicle manufacturers, such as Toyota, think that fully automated driving is not the first focus for original equipment manufacturers. Chuck Gulash, director of the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center in Ann Arbor, shares this viewpoint, as he expressed at the SAE International Government/Industry meeting held in February in Washington, D.C. “While key components of automated vehicle research efforts could lead to a fully automated car in the future, the vision is not necessarily a car that drives itself,” he said. “In our pursuit of developing more advanced automated technologies, we believe the driver must be fully engaged. Our vision is a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive copilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

23

A vision of cooperative wireless, showing how various wireless technologies work seamlessly to provide services.

Image courtesy SAIC.

Affiliated Test Beds A national test bed framework allows developers to try new ideas, to capture real-life road conditions and to use interoperable equipment built to the latest standards.

Developers and certifiers, public and private, need this capability.

According to the U.S. DOT connected vehicle research website, “The vision for the test beds is to establish multiple locations as part of a one connected system that can support continued research, testing and demonstration of connected vehicle concepts, standards, applications and innovative products. Test environments will also serve as precursors or foundations for state and local deployments using connected vehicles technologies.”

Greg D. Krueger, Connected Vehicle Program manager at SAIC, says, “We need to harness and grow the abilities of existing installations and engage the research community to move towards full deployment. First, we need to create the test assets, and then make them available to all. These test beds will provide interoperable equipment that meets national standards while at the same time meet the challenge of being constantly upgraded.”

24

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

According to SAIC, which has a key role in making test environments available to developers, this affiliated test bed effort will require an organizational structure built on collaboration, a common technical platform, sharing lessons learned for development and deployment, common tools and resources across all facilities, and recognition as creating models for future large-scale deployments.

The existing test beds, of which Michigan’s is the largest, include Anthem, Ariz., Palo Alto, Calif., McLean, Va., Orlando and Manhattan. Others are developing in various locations in Minnesota and Virginia. They are starting points for organizing a national set of affiliated test beds. There is nothing more important than testing vehicle safety systems under real-life conditions. These test beds have emerged as important assets, a must for driverless car development.

David A. McNamara is president of MTS LLC, an automotive electronics consultant. Greg D. Krueger and Ayeshah J. Abuelhiga of the Transportation Solutions Division of the Scientific Application International Corp. contributed to this article.

Spotlight

Fleet Automation Forum Working Group Tackles Commercialization Barriers

By Mohammad Poorsartep

T

he introduction of automated vehicle technologies into commercial trucking is expected to have a significant impact on fleet safety and the bottom line.

Moreover, the economic and social benefits that could be realized through fleets of automated vehicles include more efficient, less stressful traffic flow and better fuel economy, to name a few.

Automated vehicle technologies have matured significantly in the last decade. As multiple technical approaches get introduced, state governments are weighing in with a patchwork of regulations devised at promoting the new technology while minimizing risk. At least 15 U.S. states have pending or passed legislation regarding the use and operation of automated vehicles as of press time.

Automated vehicle systems can address many problems.

However, they face complex problems in the areas of technical integration, user acceptance, regulation, reliability and business-case development. The Fleet Automation Forum provides the venue to discuss barriers impeding commercialization and to develop plans to overcome them.

What is FAF? The Fleet Automation Forum has already generated great interest from government and industry. Designed as a user-centric collaborative forum, FAF actively engages important stakeholders from across multiple sectors to shape the automated fleet technologies market.

The FAF will provide an organizational framework to coordinate and direct activities necessary to define and accelerate technology commercialization.

The FAF concept was generated by the U.S. Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center and is now spearheaded collaboratively by the University of Michigan and AUVSI with the goal of engaging stakeholders from across multiple sectors to shape the automated fleet technologies market through working groups and open dialogue.

Collaboration between users, fleet owners, technologists, rule makers, and others interacting in working groups and demonstration pilots will be critical to FAF.

Operator input and performance data collected through the FAF process will enable data-based decisions regarding ongoing technical development, rule and policy decisions, and market data for private investment.

These will be achieved through three primary mechanisms: specialized working groups, pilot programs and an annual conference.

Working groups will be formed around areas of common interest or concern. Initial suggested working groups would be formed from users and other key stakeholders concerned with long-haul (freight), mass transit and regulatory/insurance issues. Other working groups, such as ones on passenger cars, will be organized over time as users identify new applications. Working groups will report at the annual conference but continue to meet throughout the year.

Pilot programs will be conducted where users will integrate automated systems into their fleets and provide reports to working groups and other FAF members.

The cost of integrating components into systems may be subsidized, and special consideration during vehicle operations may be offered to incentivize adoption of technologies.

The annual conference will provide a regular setting to increase awareness of technologies and their capabilities through demonstrations and colloquia and to generally educate the attendees about the capabilities of automated vehicle technologies. The annual conference will also provide a regular venue for working groups to present issues and recommendations to a wide audience of interested stakeholders. Users and fleet operators will have opportunities to provide input to technology developers and government organizations.

Reasons for Automation Automated vehicle technology can address a number of problems that the fleet/trucking industry is facing.

Some of the problems include safety, fuel consumption and a driver shortage.

Accidents in the trucking industry result in $19 billion in damage, lost goods, lost driver time, etc. These accidents MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

25

Federal rules governing commercial driver hours of service have increasingly become a major concern for the trucking industry. The proposed changes — decreasing driving and on-duty times and extending the restart provision — are problematic for the industry.

also result in 5,000 deaths each year. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) introduced in the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scoring system to track the safety records of drivers. In the interest of safety, the CSA program provides a disincentive to hire drivers with lower scores but has the unintended consequence of increasing costs to fleet managers and reducing the available pool of drivers. Improved safety could potentially allow drivers and the fleets they serve to achieve higher CSA scores.

In 2009, United States heavy trucks consumed 44 billion gallons of fuel (18 percent of the U.S. total) and produced 500 million tons of carbon dioxide. To put it another way, the average line haul trucker spends $70,000 a year on fuel — his single largest expense.

Significant research funding has been spent developing and evaluating semiautomated convoy technologies that reduce both fuel consumption and carbon dioxide output. Programs such as SARTRE and Energy ITS have demonstrated 20 percent and 15 percent fuel economy improvement, respectively, and are now being considered for production abroad.

Driver Shortage The American Trucking Association estimates that there is a shortage of between 20,000 and 25,000 drivers. If trends continue, this number could rise to 239,000 by the end of the decade. Retirements in the baby boomer generation and the impact of CSA scores have contributed to a lack of qualified drivers, leading to the challenges of driver retention, competitiveness of drivers’ pay and the increased cost of recruiting qualified drivers.

26

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

Automated vehicle technologies are expected to make drivers more productive and safer while reducing fatigue. They can augment the driver in a way similar to that provided by autopilots and auto-landing systems in the commercial aviation industry.

The improvements could allow for more favorable hours of service rules as the technology is proven.

FAF’s Objectives The FAF’s objectives include validating a business case, accelerating technology adoption and informing policy makers.

To do this, the FAF will collaboratively define, develop, and validate the costs and benefits associated with automated fleet technology. It will also accelerate the adoption of fleet automation systems by offering forum stakeholders a competitive advantage. Forum consensus will help identify which technologies require subsidized (public or private) funding. The FAF will capture users’ needs and help influence research and technology investment. It will offer a single setting to identify technology barriers and collaboratively develop solutions that will enable accelerated technology adoption.

The FAF will support informed regulatory decisions.

Various state and federal agencies have legislation or regulations regarding the use and operation of automated vehicles. Without coordination, such a patchwork of rules for automated systems will increase costs, slow widespread application and potentially impede the development of technical or functional component standards.

With support from government and industry, University of Michigan-Dearborn and AUVSI have been key players in organizing FAF. For more information or to be engaged with this activity, contact Mohammad Poorsartep from the University of Michigan-Dearborn at mpoorsar@umich.edu.

End Users

Is Your

Guy Fraker

Driverless Car

in Good Hands?

Insurance Remains a Hurdle for Driverless Car Technology

D

riverless cars pose a host of technological and even social acceptance challenges, but there’s another issue that must be resolved before they truly take to the roads — insurance.

“If they [insurance companies] file a rate wrong, it can take years to get a corrective filing approved, even if it’s a discount, and may require tens of millions of dollars in programming hours,” Fraker tells Mission Critical.

“There is a new era of mobility. ... You’re seeing new drive trains, new metals, new glass, autonomous functions, shared transportation, at a hockey-stick growth rate, and one of the only places where all of those trends come together in a way that affects the consumer pocketbook immediately is insurance,” says Guy Fraker, a technology consultant and former Innovation Director from within the insurance industry. Fraker has studied the issue of insurance and driverless technology since 2007.

“You have 51 independent, uncoordinated state insurance commissioners. They are typically not a regulatory body sought out in advance of broad-scale vehicle deployment as their role is to react to rate filings from insurers who have taken those factors into account. If an auto manufacturer is going to come out with something dramatic, they will go to the DMV, but not necessarily the department of insurance. However, now that a ‘driver’ may be an artificial intelligent operating system, the time will come for this to change.”

One problem for the industry in general is that it is regulated by 51 separate state commissioner offices, so setting insurance rates means getting approval 51 times, with some of those processes taking years.

Another big question facing both auto manufacturers and insurers centers on the cost of repair. For instance, a new design might feature radar sensors installed low MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

27

in the front grill. But if a trip down a gravel road breaks those sensors, what cost $150 to $200 to install on the assembly line might cost 10 times that to replace.

icized over questions of pace by some, “This is one where I believe tremendous potential gains could be achieved.”

Fraker says.

“The insurance industry is essentially in the business of restoring something from an unintended loss. While auto manufacturers are certainly mindful of repairability, a simple design choice that is appealing to the marketing people or the design folks may also hold an unintended consequence of increasing the vehicle’s premium despite a near-zero collision record,” Fraker says.

Auto companies also could pool their test data, something they have been very reluctant to do. But doing so could generate the millions of miles of data the insurance industry would like to see.

The large insurance companies are also cautious, especially when it comes to autonomous technology, a real revolution in the automotive world. The companies are used to having tens of millions of vehicle miles traveled as a data set.

For instance, crash test data is easy to get: ram two cars together and see what happens. Driverless car technology, however, is meant to avoid such outcomes but it’s difficult to measure their effectiveness.

“If we took, hypothetically, all the manufacturers and all the cars they have on the road, and add Google, we probably have 1 to 2 million miles of test data,” Fraker says. “But who’s aggregating it, and where is that being used?”

Even if all that is done, one big challenge still remains — pricing the insurance to reflect the quality of the technology. Currently, rates change depending on the experience of the driver. A newly minted teenage driver pays much more than a 45-year-old driver, for instance.

“That’s a real issue,” Fraker says. “Insurance is really good at measuring what happens. The industry is not built on measuring what doesn’t happen.”

“Here’s what’s interesting: Will the insurance premiums reflect an inexperienced operator when the car is doing the driving? If that is the case, then there is a profound consumer message being sent about unreliability,” Fraker says.

The Solutions

Liability lawsuits in the United States also pose a problem, he says.

Faced with these problems, Fraker sees a couple of possible solutions. One, the technology will likely be embraced by smaller, more nimble insurance companies that can innovate faster than the industry titans.

They’ll use an Internet-based claims model and be more willing to take chances.

“That’s the kind of company that can use self-driving vehicles as their breakout technology,” Fraker says.

“If you have a small specialty line insurer that can move under the radar because their business isn’t that big to begin with, if you want to innovate and go to market, the upside with them is pace,” he says. “If you want one of the big brand names to endorse your technology, you’re going to grow old.”

One change that could help bring even the large companies along would be to replace the 51-state and district insurance regulatory model with a single federal-level entity, maybe aimed just at setting insurance rates for driverless cars.

Insurance companies “could save all the operational expenses to file and file and correct, by just dealing with one entity,” he says. While the federal government is often crit28

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

“No other society in the world has litigation with the lottery mentality as it is here,” Fraker says. “If we’re not careful, we are only going to slow it down right here at home. This could literally cost the U.S. a technological leadership position. It’s happened before. And that would be a tragedy.”

Despite these hurdles, he sees autonomous driving become a reality, if for no other reason than the alwayswired millennial generation wants to stay connected even when in a vehicle.

“Driving is a distraction for them. If they can’t stay connected, they are not going to buy a car.”

It also means freedom of mobility for the elderly and disabled and other populations, something that hit home for Fraker personally when his son, who is on the autism spectrum and unable to drive, showed him a Web report on driverless technology a few years ago.

“He saw the first videos that The New York Times broke about self-driving cars” and asked his father what he thought. Fraker instead asked his son what he thought about it. “He said, ‘it means I get to own a car someday.’

That hit me. It has driven me since.”

12-15 August

Walter E. Washington Convention Center

REGI

•

Washington, D.C.

TER

NOW

Conference from 12 - 15 August Tradeshow from 13 - 15 August 600+ Exhibiting Companies 40+ Countries Represented 8,000+ Attendees

Promoting and Supporting

Unmanned Systems and

Robotics Across the Globe

auvsishow.org

MISSION CRITICAL

•

May 2013

31

SAV E the DAT E

Köln, Germany

•

15-16 October 2013

Save the date for this dynamic conference packed with a great line-up of speakers representing international regulatory agencies, as well as civil and commercial remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) end users.

P LAN N E D S ES S ION T OPICS INCLUDE: • Emerging RPAS applications in the commercial and civilian sectors • Market Trends Talk – A discussion on potential for emerging UAS applications • Facilitating RPAS operations in unrestricted airspace • Standards development for RPAS in Europe • Funding and insuring RPAS operations • Influencing public perception on RPAS operations • Encouraging mutual cooperation for RPAS development between the defense and commercial sectors

For the latest event information, including a detailed agenda and speaker line-up, visit www.auvsi.org/use