The Future of Vehicle Technology

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The

Future of

Vehicle Technology

New Driving Experience Around the Corner

T

■ Contributed by:

Dr. Passakon Prathombutr President Intelligent Transport System (ITS) Thailand

he recent development of IT technologies such as smartphones, the 4G telecommunications standard LTE, high precision global positioning systems (GPS), LIDAR remote-sensing technology, big data, social networking and so on, have brought game-changing potential to the development of new services for the automotive industry. These new services will see the emergence of “automated vehicles” and “connected vehicles”, and sooner or later, the automotive industry will have to adopt communication, electronic and computing technologies to comply with these features.

Already, we have seen new vehicles equipped with advanced assistive driving technologies, such as adaptive cruise control, lane keeping and blind-spot detection.

The major functions of these ICT technologies are safety, convenience and saving

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energy. However, vehicles themselves cannot be smart without the “cooperation” of other vehicles and the infrastructure around them. The role of an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) will be to oversee the integration and standardization of ICT technologies used by, and between, vehicles, the physical infrastructure and their environment. This task will take time and will, of course, face barriers in both management and policy, since it will involve changing the consumer experience.

The Automated Vehicle The term “automated vehicle” has been popular since Google posted the Google driverless car on YouTube in 2012. Driverless cars were officially permitted on real streets for the first time when the U.S. State of Nevada passed a law in June 2011 permitting the operation of autonomous cars within that state. In fact, automated-vehicle research began in the United States in the 1990s, in the hands of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the International Task Force on VehicleHighway Automation (ITFVHA), the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the California Partner for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH). These organizations demonstrated automated

driving in 1997, after which the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) hosted three technical contests. Then Google joined the competition.

Today, some automated features are already appearing in the market, such as lane keeping, low-speed following (LSF), adaptive cruise control and autonomous parking, with which vehicles can find parking spots and park themselves automatically.

The growing field of vehicular automation is measured, first of all, by how we define the term “automatic”. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the United States lists five levels in defining automated vehicles: Level 0: The driver has complete control of the vehicle at all times.

Level 1: Individual controls are automated, such as electronic stability control or automatic braking.

Level 2: At least two controls can be automated in unison, such as adaptive cruise control in combination with lane keeping.

Level 3: In certain conditions, the driver can relinquish control of all safetycritical functions. The car senses when conditions req uire the driver to retake control and provides a “sufficiently comfortable transition time” for the driver to do so.

Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with no expectation of the driver controlling the vehicle at any time. As this vehicle controls all functions from start to stop, including all parking functions, this description includes unoccupied cars.1 During the 20th ITS World Congress in Tokyo in October 2013, many companies demonstrated vehicles with automated car-parking ability. They presented the concept of future lifestyles, with smartphones used to command cars to drive themselves from the parking lot to pick up occupants on schedule.

The cars were also able to park or locate a wireless-charging spot within the parking lot. The demonstrations required an outdoor area since the cars recognized a map and positioned themselves precisely within a range of 10 centimeters using high-precision GPS known as a Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS). In addition, the cars used radar to detect other objects, to avoid collisions.

In general, autonomous cars protect themselves from collisions using a number of sensors, including LIDAR (laser radar), radar, GPS and cameras, with on-board computers taking control of steering, acceleration and braking. Although we have not yet seen fully automated vehicles in the market, the development of technologies is promising. Technology-market intelligence firm ABI Research forecasts that automated cars will become a reality by 2020 and that 10 million

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173 such new cars will be rolling out on to United States’ public highways every year by 2032.2 Another market analyst, Navigant Research, forecasts that autonomous vehicles will gradually gain traction in the market over the coming two decades and by 2035, sales of autonomous vehicles will reach 95.4 million annually, representing 75% of all light-duty vehicle sales.3

The Connected Vehicle Using wireless communication technology, everything is able to be connected, as envisaged in the proposed Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT would connect to or from not only electrical appliances, but also vehicles. A vehicle, its driver and passengers, a pedestrian, a traffic signal, traffic signs, mobile phones – all of these things could be connected and, in some senses, form a network. This could be either a vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) or an Internet network. Communication between or among vehicles is known as V2V (vehicle to vehicle communication) and communication between vehicles and infrastructure, V2I. There is now a new term: V2X, or vehicle to anything communication. Automated vehicles will need V2X capability in order to synchronize with other cars on the street and exchange information with the road infrastructure. Instead of a car and its occupants relying on the sensors in that car alone, communication among vehicles would work like that in a bat colony, and would considerably benefit driving. For example, electronic brake lights will transmit a wireless signal to following cars, to warn their drivers of action by the car in front. Since V2X does not require line-of-sight, as traditional brake lights do, the electronic signal will provide a better warning in blind spots.

Real-time information can also be sent directly to the driver’s instruments, either warning of accidents or guiding speed in the case of eco-driving. “Automated platoon driving” will apply when vehicles travelling in a row synchronize their speed and maintain a minimum gap between each vehicle in order to save energy.

Once vehicles are able to connect to the Internet, this will open up access to an enormous range of applications and services. Already, we have traffic information and location-based services providing real-time information to drivers, such as current remaining parking space in parking lots. Soon, online vehicles will be able to act as probes, sending data such as speed, route and location back to a central server. Big-data technology will then analyze these data and suggest routes for the drivers. This will also involve big-data analysis of locations with high accident rates and consequent “black spot” warnings issued to drivers.

In Thailand, a co-research project named “Car-Talk” has been under way since October 2009, involving the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), King Mongkut’s Universities of Technology at Thonburi and North Bangkok and the Asian Institute of Technology. It has focused on the protocols, hardware and software for V2V and V2I communication. The project has demonstrated V2I by sending car-park information, traffic signs and accidentwarning messages from roadsides to passing vehicles. Demonstrations of V2V communication have involved the streaming of pictures from a camera in a leading vehicle, transmitted on a multi-hop basis, to be displayed in a following vehicle.

Clearly, there is plenty of room for business opportunities in these developing technologies. However, standards are required, along with interoperability, and policy-makers and regulators will play an important role.

In summary, at least four stakeholders will be involved in the connectedvehicle market. They are auto-makers, communication operators, application developers and the owners of infrastructure. Together, they will change the driving game and bring consumers a totally new experience, especially in matters of road safety. The connected-vehicle market is expected to reach a value of US$131.9 billion by 2019.4 It is time to reach out for related opportunities in the Asean market. ◆◆◆

References 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car 2. dailycamera.com, 5 September 2013, “Self-driving cars could be a decade away”, retrieved 6 September 2013.

3. navigantresearch.com, 21 August 2013, “Autonomous vehicles will surpass 95 million in annual sales by 2035”, retrieved 6 September 2013.

4. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11

Thailand Automotive Industry Directory 2014