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Connected and Automated Vehicles: 9th University Transportation Centers Conference
Few issues are emerging more quickly, or have the potential to spur revolutionary change, than that of connected/automated vehicles (CV/AV). This is true not only for highways, but across all transportation modes. This Spotlight Conference, which is organized around the four cluster areas identified in the NCHRP report “Connected/Automated Vehicle Research Roadmap for AASHTO”, will focus on the impact of CV/AV on transportation, including planning, policy, operations, land use, design, freight movements, and transit.
Michigan’s Sayer a Change Champion
Burney Simpson
The White House recently recognized the University of Michigan’s James R. Sayer as one of the 2015 Transportation Champions of Change for his work on connected and automated vehicles.
Sayer is a research scientist and head of the Human Factors Group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).
He currently leads the Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Model Deployment, a U.S. Department of Transportation-sponsored program. The DOT plans to use the results to determine driver acceptance of connected vehicles, and to “evaluate the feasibility, scalability, security, and device interoperability of connected-vehicle technologies.”
That project has been expanded into the Ann Arbor Connected Vehicle Test Environment. Sayer said in a release that Ann Arbor “will be the world’s first example of how connected vehicle and infrastructure technology can and will be utilized in a community of the future.”
The goal is to make roads safer and reduce fatal vehicle crashes, he said.
“Last year alone there were over 30,000 fatalities. Our current transportation system is responsible for $240 billion per-year cost in terms of medical and work loss,” he said. “Connected vehicles, similar to what we have deployed (here) could reduce up to 80 percent of unimpaired crashes.”
Sayer was instrumental in the development of Mcity, the 32-acre test site for connected and automated vehicles operated by the university’s Mobility Transformation Center that opened this summer in Ann Arbor.
The Transportation Champions of Change are honored for their leadership and innovation in the field. In addition to Sayer, the 2015 Champions are:
Atorod Azizinamini, Marilyn Bull, Habib Dagher, Elaine Roberts, Nathaniel Ford, Sr., Olatunji Oboi Reed, Peter Lagerwey, Robert Portiss, Kyle Wagenschutz, and Carl Weimer.
The champions were honored at a ceremony with Anthony Foxx, secretary of the US DOT, Federal Highways Administrator Greg Nadeau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Acting Administrator Scott Darling, National Economic Council Director and Assistant to the President Jeff Zients, and other officials.
Autonomous Tech Scales Capitol Hill
Burney Simpson
The autonomous transportation industry brought its game to Capitol Hill this week, holding a nearly all-day event that featured speeches from a U.S. Senator, four Congressmen, and a number of driverless leaders, all over the course of a luncheon, a seminar, and a showcase event/cocktail party with several dozen of the top firms in the business.
Not bad for a day’s work.
Trade group ITS America put on ‘The Future of Mobility: Rethinking Transportation for the Next 30 Years’ and garnered the participation of Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, and Representatives Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, and Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon.
While much of the conversation was positive and friendly, a few of the seminar panelists took the opportunity to raise issues that Congress may have to address someday.
- Data Privacy and Security — Daniel Morgan, chief data officer with the US Department of Transportation, noted that the security and privacy of citizen travel data was essential but that the information could be beneficial for metropolitan planners. Morgan floated the idea that a third party firm be responsible for collecting and storing the data if people objected to the federal government holding it.
- Reserving DSRC wavelength for V2V and V2I — Alan Korn, an executive with heavy-truck parts supplier Meritor WABCO, said the Dedicated Short-Range Communications 5.9 GHz spectrum must be reserved for Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications to ensure autonomous driving safety. Later, Sen. Peters said that new technology may allow for the sharing of the 5.9 spectrum with other Wi-Fi users.
- Driverless Timeline — Supplying a welcome dose of reality was Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). Dingus said developing a truly autonomous system would be considerably more difficult and probably take longer than some recent studies and press reports suggest. Driverless vehicles will have to be safer than the much-maligned human driver but consider that the average human has one rear-end crash every 25 years, and makes 3 million braking decision in that time, said Dingus. “It is very difficult to build a system that is that robust,” said Dingus.
The exhibition hall featured 22 organizations involved with autonomous transportation development, including Eberle Design, Econolite, GM, Iteris, the University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center, NXP Semiconductors, Southwest Research Institute, and Uber.
VTTI was there too taking a bit of a victory lap after its successful demo this week on a nearby highway of its driverless Cadillac SRX. The ride along featured Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and generated extensive media coverage (See “Virginia Seeks Autonomous Research Lead,” October 20, 2015).
The showcase garnered a little more exposure for the technology with another half-dozen members of Congress visiting the exhibit hall to check out the firms on display, according to an ITS spokesperson.
The day also offered an exhibit of a DeLorean car from an old movie that predicted people would fly on skateboardy-type things. This fascinated a number of Gen-Yers and Millennials who took selfies.
Photo: United States Capitol, 2015, Matt C.
ITS California Buzzes on DOT Grants, Autonomous Levels Concept
John Estrada
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:
- Level 0: hands and feet ON;
- Level 1: hands or feet OFF;
- Level 2: hands and feet OFF, eyes ON;
- Level 3: hands, feet, eyes OFF, brain on;
- Level 4: hands, feet, eyes, brain OFF - Constrained environments;
- Level 5: hands, feet, eyes, brain OFF – Unconstrained.
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.
ITS-California Show Covers Connected Vehicles, Urban Planning
Burney Simpson
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.
DOT Lists its Connected Vehicle Safety Apps in Fact Sheet
The U.S. Department of Transportation has released a handy fact sheet on connected vehicles that lists and briefly describes the major safety applications that connected technology is addressing. The two-page Connected Vehicle Applications: Safety is a pdf-format guide that categorizes the 29 projects by Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P).
Under V2I, the fact sheet lists and describes such applications as Oversize Vehicle Warning, Reduced Speed/Work Zone Warning, Spot Weather Impact Warning, Warnings About Hazards in Work Zone and others.
For example, the description under Red Light Violation Warning is: “Broadcasts signal phase and timing (SPaT) and other data to the in-vehicle device, allowing warnings to drivers of impending red light violations.”
Under V2V applications, the applications include Blind Spot/Lane Change Warning, Forward Collision Warning, Tailgating Advisory, and Situational Awareness.
The single application listed under V2P is Transit Pedestrian Application.
The fact sheet also links to the Connected Vehicle Reference Implementation Architecture website for those seeking more details.
Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015
The Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015 will be a multidisciplinary forum designed to advance the deployment of automated vehicles. Each day will kick off with high-level presentations by some of the brightest minds in the field. Network over lunch, and then in the afternoon, choose from interactive breakout sessions where you can go in-depth with your colleagues, share perspectives and have an open dialogue on the industry’s most pressing issues.
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