Memorable Memorial Day for Self-Driving Vehicles

Burney Simpson

Self-driving car proponents in California and the Netherlands spent the Memorial Day weekend testing the technology, networking with other advocates, and working on the technology.

The first-ever Autonomous Vehicle Track Day self-driving car event was run at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Willows, Calif.

The event attracted about 24 firms, university workshops, and start-ups in the autonomous vehicle space. Innovators including PolySync, Denso, Renovo Motors, Velodyne and Nvidia were set to go.

This event was intended to help some firms address engineering challenges and interact with each other, according to venture investor Joshua Schachter, a driving force behind the Track Day. Schachter has said he would like to it turn into a self-driving car race.

Across the pond, the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) was held on the A270 highway between Helmond and Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The GCDC is a competitive demonstration of vehicle automation, along with Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication.

The vehicles in the challenge demonstrated automated lane changing under three scenarios — vehicles that merge or join a lane of vehicles in a form of platooning; automated crossing and exiting the highway; and automated pace-making for emergency vehicles in a traffic jam.

This video shows some of the 10 student teams in the competition preparing for the event.

“We deliberately chose to test on the A270 public road. Researchers often use their own test environments and their own cars. But you don’t really know if it works until you’ve tried it on public roads, when you have interactions with other cars and the road surface,” Bastiaan Krosse, program manager for Automated Driving at TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), said in a press release.

There were four leaders behind the GCDC competition — Eindhoven University of Technology, TNO, Viktoria of Sweden, and INDIADA of Span.

The GCDC is part of the i-Game research project, a European Commission-funded effort to speed the development of autonomous vehicles. It began in October 2013 and is scheduled to end this October.

The i-Game Project objectives include 1) unified architecture and requirements for an interoperable cooperative automated driving platform; 2) supervisory control system for cooperative automated driving applications; 3) standardized messages for interoperable wireless communications based automated driving; 4) and validation tools and events for performance and interoperability testing of cooperative automated driving applications.

Photo by TNO.