Key session topics include:
There have been stories recently about Silicon Valley vs. Detroit battling for autonomous vehicle development dominance.
Guys, while you’re busy fighting, the rest of the world just may pass you.
The ITS World Congress held in Bordeaux, France, this week generated a slew of news about the driverless programs going on in Asia and Europe. One grabber was the fully-driverless 360-mile trip (580 kilometers) from Paris to Bordeaux in a Peugeot Citroen.
Volvo announced it would begin on-road testing in 2107 of its IntelliSafe Auto Pilot system. Drivers will use a push-button system on their XC90 steering wheel to switch to automated driving mode when they are traveling on sections of Swedish roads designated for driverless operations. Tests will be conducted on 30 miles of roads around Volvo’s headquarter city of Gothenburg.
Meanwhile, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson traveled to Washington, D.C. to warn the feds they need to set national rules around the testing and development of driverless vehicles.
“The U.S. risks losing its leading position (in autonomous driving) due to the lack of federal guidelines for the testing and certification of autonomous vehicles,” Samuelsson said in a press release. “Europe has suffered to some extent by having a patchwork of rules and regulations. It would be a shame if the U.S. took a similar path to Europe in this crucial area.”
(Thanks for the thought, Mr. Samuelsson. Capitol Hill will get to it. First they have to pass extension 3,000 of the Highway Trust Fund. Then they need to investigate whether the next Speaker of the House is having an affair. We’re busy over here.)
Several thousand miles east of Gothenburg a Chinese transportation official said his country would invest $30 billion in its intelligent transportation system through 2020. A spending pledge from a bureaucrat may be wishful thinking but it indicates China is alert to the international attention shown to driverless technology. Besides this is the country with a driverless bus going 20 miles through a cityscape.
And then there are the Japanese. This week Toyota announced that it would offer in Japan this year three models equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication capability. Toyota also pledged to bring cars to market by 2020 that the driver could put in autonomous auto-pilot mode so the vehicle could independently change lanes, merge with traffic, and pass other cars.
Also in the Land of the Rising Sun, the coastal city of Fujisawa will next year see a driverless taxi test provided by Robot Taxi (site is in Japanese). Plans call for the cabs to take about 50 participating residents on local shopping excursions of about 3 kilometers, The Guardian reports. The test is in preparation for the 2020 Olympics which will be hosted just down the road in Tokyo.
Granted, similar products and concepts are going on in the U.S. And granted, some of this is savvy marketers who are just as smart as Americans when it comes to grabbing headlines.
For that matter, the competition between Detroit and California is driving tech advances and helping to make the U.S. the place to be when it comes to driverless research and development.
But fighting in your own backyard only gets you so far. Let’s hope we don’t see a repeat of the 1960s-1970s when Japan ate Detroit’s lunch.
The annual meeting of ITS California was held last week in Southern California. The major buzz at the show was the previous week’s announcement by the US DOT that initial winners in grants for next-generation V2V and V2I technology were proposals from New York, Florida and Wyoming. Many of the participants at the show felt very strongly that an award should have gone to California. It will be interesting to see what if any of those winning projects get off the ground.
There were quite a few interesting speakers at the show. A couple of highlights included:
Greg Larson from CalTrans who led a panel that considered whether bus and truck automation should come before auto automation. Greg presented a chart from Richard Bishop of Bishop Consulting that showed the various levels of automation leading to autonomous cars as described by the SAE. Rather than a detailed description of what makes a vehicle fit into various levels, Richard describes it as follows:
There were also a series of demonstrations of connected vehicle technologies from eTrans Systems, Econolite, Bosch and Arada Systems.
This was our second year at the show and in that short time it was clear how quickly technology is advancing in the work of Intelligent Transportation.
The likely massive changes wrought by autonomous technology on community design and planning, along with the growth of connected vehicle technology are two of the major themes at the Intelligent Transportation Society - California (ITS-CA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Los Angles at the LAX Airport Hilton on September 21 -23.
And Google will provide an update on its self-driving car project.
Urban planners and transportations experts are increasingly looking at the changes that may be wrought by autonomous technology and intelligent transportation systems. At the ITS-CA, panelists will cover such topics as achieving smart cities, building sustainable communities, re-imagining urban throughways, and integrated corridor management.
On the connected vehicle side, seminars will address the likelihood that such vehicles as buses and trucks, not cars, will be the leaders as the nation adopts automated and driverless vehicles.
Just this month U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that New York City, Tampa, Fla., and the state of Wyoming will receive up to $42 million as part of the agency’s national Connected Vehicle Pilot deployment program.
Projects in the program are intended to advance the adoption of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, with the goal of reducing traffic congestion, cutting accidents, and moving freight more efficiently.
Speakers at ITS-CA include leading government executives in the autonomous vehicle industry, including California Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty, US DOT Assistant Director of Research and Technology Greg Winfree, and Peter Marx, chief innovation technology officer of the City of Los Angeles.
Also speaking will be Paul Copping, smart city advisor with Digital Greenwich, and Paul Feenstra, SVP, government affairs with ITS America.
And Dmitri Dolgov, Google’s principal engineer and software lead, will present on his firms view of driverless cars and the future of mobility.
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Qualcomm and Honda, along with the Oregon and Utah departments of transportation, were named recipients of the Best of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Awards, ITS America announced this week at its 25th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Pittsburgh.
Qualcomm and Honda teamed to develop, test and successfully demonstrate dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) technology that allowed vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication. The smartphone app determines whether a pedestrian is in danger of being hit by the vehicle, and sends warnings to both the driver and the pedestrian.
The awards honor organizations in the high-tech transportation industry for projects that demonstrated “specific and measurable outcomes and exemplified innovation by establishing a “new dimension” of performance,” according to ITS America.
The Oregon Department of Transportation’s “OR 217 Active Traffic Management,” project was honored for Best New Innovative Products, Services, or Applications. This pdf describes the OR 217 ATM.
ITS also presents awards in four categories under the Best New Innovative Practices banner — sustainability in transportation; partnership deployment (business-to-business, government-to-government, or public/private); research, design and innovation; and rural ITS.
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Honda R&D Americas, Inc. won the Research, Design and Innovation award for “Honda and Qualcomm DSRC-based-Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) and Other Vulnerable Road User Safety Project.”
The Sustainability and Transportation award honored the Utah Department of Transportation’s “Winter Road Weather Index” project. See pdf of UDOT 2014 Annual Efficiencies Report for WRWI.
Cubic Transportation Systems and the Chicago Transit Authority took the Partnership Deployment award for its “Chicago Transit Authority Ventra Update: Open and Loving It” bankcard payment system.
The Rural ITS Project award will be presented at the National Rural ITS (NRITS) Conference in Snowbird, Utah, August 9-12.
“These awards recognize the leading transportation innovators who’ve effectively demonstrated a dedication to advancing ITS through innovative projects,” Regina Hopper, president and CEO of ITS America, said in a press release.
Yesterday was the first full day of the ITS America 25th Annual Meeting & Expo.
The show’s opening keynote speaker was Chris Urmson, Google’s director of self-driving cars. We’ve heard Google speak about their autonomous car program quite a few times over the past 18 months. What is most exciting is that each time it is clear that they have moved forward and are continuing to make significant progress.
This time the biggest differences were around the “view” that the driverless car has of its surroundings and how the vehicle reacts to what it “sees”. Urmson had an interesting clip of a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck on the road and the vehicle having to figure out what to do with that. It seemed to handle it just fine.
Chris stated that the goal of the Google team is to have vehicles on the road in less than 4 years … just in time so his oldest son won’t need to get a driver’s license. That doesn’t seem unrealistic considering the pace that Google has been moving on this.
The show opened Monday with the introduction of Regina Hopper as the new president and CEO of ITS America. Ms. Hopper is quite impressive, seems to have great experience, and looks to be an excellent choice for this challenging role. This was especially true considering she has only been on the job for about two weeks.
ITS America moved the show to Pittsburgh this year from Detroit, and it’s interesting to compare the two cities. Both are excellent choices for a show dedicated to innovative transportation technologies. And both are large Rust Belt cities that have gone through some tough periods.
In Detroit, the revitalization is just beginning and it is clear that there is a long way to go but there is an optimism and can-do spirit that leads you to believe that, someday, it will be successful.
Pittsburgh has that same optimism and spirit but it is much further along in its revitalization. The view of the city as you come out of the tunnel from the airport is just stunning and it is clear that the city has come a long way.
Overall the show is well attended and it offers a good mix of ITS topics and presentations. There was a lot more focus at this show on DSRC and connected vehicles than we’ve seen at previous shows. This is a technology that is also advancing very rapidly.
Looking forward to seeing how much progress there will be by the next show.
One of the biggest autonomous technology shows of the year begins next Monday when the 25th Annual Meeting & Expo of Intelligent Transportation Systems opens on June 1 in Pittsburgh at the David Lawrence Convention Center.
The Bridges to Innovation show runs from June 1-3 and will draw about 2,000 technology and transportation executives, researchers, engineers, and investors to do business, catch up, and take in the 250 presentations across 60 workshops and sessions.
Topics covered include connected and automated vehicles, security, funding, shared mobility and transit, commercial vehicle and freight logistics, mobile applications, safety, and transportation systems operations. A pdf of the program can be downloaded here.
And folks going to the show just might see one of the autonomous cars that Uber is testing around Pittsburgh.
Many attendees will be from the ITS’ 27 state chapters across 40 states and their 1,200 member organizations, and the more than 450 public agencies, companies, and research institutions that are members of the organization. ITS Pennsylvania is the cohost of the meeting & expo.
On June 1, the opening keynote will be given by Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving cars program, and a one-time faculty member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh.
ITS AWARD WINNERS
The winners of the Best of ITS Awards will be named during the opening plenary session on June 1 from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Winners will be named in Best New Innovative Product, Service or Innovation; Best New Innovative Practice – Partnership Deployment; Best New Innovative Practice – Research, Design and Innovation; Best New Innovative Practice – Sustainability in Transportation.
Attendees also have the opportunity to visit some of the driverless-related centers in the Pittsburgh area, including a connected vehicle test bed and the PennDOT regional transportation management center, and to take a bicycle tour of Pittsburgh.
A visit to the CMU Autonomous Vehicle Demonstration is sold out.
CMU’s influence runs throughout the meeting and expo. The closing keynote will be delivered by David Plouffe, a one-time aide to President Barack Obama who is now a senior vice president of strategy with Uber Technologies. Uber in February announced a partnership with CMU and the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center near the school’s campus.
125 EXHIBITORS
The exhibition hall opens at 5:00 p.m. on Monday, June 1, at the Convention Center. There are more than 125 exhibitors including – Activu, Bosch Security Systems, Eberle Design, Florida’s Automated Vehicles Initiative, Harbrick, Iteris, Siemens, Southwest Research Institute, Thales, Transportation Research Board, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, and Xerox.
Many attendees will be arriving early on Sunday, May 31, to participate in meetings of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). In addition, state departments of transportation from around the country will hold a roundtable from 4 - 6 p.m. to discuss funding issues, deployment strategies, and the efficient use of technology.
Photo of Pittsburgh by Allie Caulfield, 2008.
Key session topics include: