auvsi's unmanned systems mission critical: intelligent transportation

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Mission CritiCal • Spring 2011 3

6 ESSENTIALCOMPONENTS New products and technology

9 Q&A A leading expert talks transportation

VOLUME1 NO.1 • SPR ING2011

AMAZINGRACEA turn left is a step in the right direction for visually impaired drivers. The National Federation of the Blind sponsored ademonstration of technology that lets blind people drive.

Page13

21 STATEOFTHEART Who’s doing what, where

31 FUTUREJOBS Making the industry work

OntheCover:A blind driver laps the track at DaytonaInternational Speedway thanks to robotictechnology. Photo courtesy the NationalFederation of the Blind.

CONTENTS

Using this Ford Escape, roboticized with TORC Technology’s ByWire XGV system, and tactile interfaces developed by Virginia Tech, a blind man successfully drove a lap at the Daytona International Speedway.

4 Mission CritiCal • Spring 2011

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 writ-ten 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. Mission Critical is provided with AUVSI membership.

CARTALkImagine your car is talking about you. Don’t worry, it’s saying nice things. It’s trying to save you money, time and keep you from having an accident.

39 POPCULTURECORNER The entertainment world’s view

41 TECHNOLOGYGAP What needs to be done

43 UNCANNYVALLEY Concerns about new technology

44 TESTING,TESTING Peek at ongoing research

45 TIMELINE Tracing technology

47 ENDUSERS The people moving the technology

Page23

Page33

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ROADTRAINSPOTTINGHell is driving with other people. A technology consortium in Europe is trying to change that with its Sartre program.


Editorial

VicePresidentofPublications andCommunications,Editor

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AssociateEditorStephanie [email protected]

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andMarketingManagerLisa Fick

[email protected]+1 571 255 7779

A publication of

PresidentandCEOMichael Toscano

ExecutiveVicePresidentGretchen West

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Arlington, VA 22206 USA+1 703 845 9671

[email protected]

Welcome to the f irst issue of

Mission Critical.

It looks a little different from the

Unmanned Systems magazines you may

be used to seeing. For one thing, it’s first

and foremost an electronic publication.

This means it can be animated on the web,

with pages that turn like real pages and

embedded links that can take you straight

from the page to the web to get more in-

formation.

Mission Critical will be published quar-

terly on the web and will be free to AUVSI

members. Each issue will tackle a specific

theme and cover it in depth with feature

stories, graphics and news departments

all aimed at one specific area relating to

unmanned systems, robotics technologies

and their use. This issue is devoted to in-

telligent transportation.

The accident and death toll from auto-

mobiles around the world is staggering,

as is the amount of fuel wasted sitting in

traffic, not to mention the pollution that

results. This is where unmanned systems

technology can come into play. It can

make cars safer, more efficient and even

more fun to use.

How do we get there? AUVSI and the

National Defense Industrial Association

are helping to facilitate the dual use and

technology transfer of unmanned ground

robotics technology between the U.S.

Department of Defense, Department of

Transportation, NASA and the civil and

commercial markets. This is called the

Transportation Technology Transfer Ini-

tiative, or T3I, and you’ll read more about

it in the pages to follow. It’s intended to

help lead to vehicles that can communicate

with each other and with the environment

around them to make transportation safer

and more efficient.

Part of this effort is aimed at building pub-

lic acceptance of the technology. People are

often concerned about new technologies

until they see what can be accomplished

with them.

For instance, the first modern elevators

were introduced in the 1800s. To help

quell safety concerns, Elisha Otis dem-

onstrated one in 1852 that had a braking

system that would hold it up even if the

cable broke. Electric elevators came into

use later in the century and led to a new

revolution, that of skyscrapers, buildings

that wouldn’t be possible without them.

Throughout most of these years, elevators

had human operators. Over time, however,

that need faded. Now, having a human op-

erator in an elevator is unusual. They have

proven their safety and reliability, and

people accept them as a daily part of life.

Cell phones are another example of how

technology can take off and change our

lives. The first commercial cell phone went

on sale in the early 1980s and was the

size of a brick. Now phones are tiny and

everywhere: just in the last two decades,

the number of mobile phone subscrip-

tions jumped from a little over 12 million

to more than 4.6 billion, connecting the

world in a way never seen — or more ac-

curately — heard of before.

Future issues of Mission Critical will look

at the areas of first responders, medical

and home robotics, and exploration, in-

cluding by oil and gas. We hope you will

join us for the journey.

President’s messageMichaelToscano


Essential Components

DARPA isn’t the only one

getting into the flying au-

tonomous car game. Three

Chinese researchers from

the Department of Indus-

trial Design at the School of

Mechanical & Automotive

Engineering at South China

University of Technology

came up with the YEE car

concept, which also has a fly-

ing mode, as a way for future

city dwellers to get around.

“What we design is a car

easy to operate, which

precisely satisfies the high-

efficiency of the rapid pace

of life; the intimate design

and the use of new energy

best embodies the contest

theme: the harmonious

coexistence of ‘people-car-

nature,’” says Lai Zexin, one

of the designers.

The design, which won the

Gold Award of Best Creative

Future at the First Interna-

tional Concept Car Design

Contest held in Beijing, fea-

tures propellers fixed into

the back wheels, looking a

lot like spokes, and would be

solar charged.

The concept depends on

building pocket airports.

These small areas, about the

size of two football fields,

would service these two- to

four-seater flying SUVs.

The designers have the lofty

goal of flying by 2015. The YEE unmanned flying car concept, which aims to fly by 2015. Photo courtesy South China University of Technology.

‘Roads?…Wedon’tneedroads’


Third time’s the charm: The Volvo C30 Electric is equipped with three climate systems. One supplies the passengers with heating or cooling, one cools or heats the battery pack and one cools the electric motor and power electronics. Photo courtesy Volvo.

keepingpassengers,andbatteries,warm inSwedenVolvo is using an innova-

tive heating method to keep

passengers in its new C30

Electric vehicle toasty warm

without frying the car’s bat-

tery driving range.

The C30 Electric has three climate sys-

tems: One heats or cools the passengers,

one heats or cools the battery pack — key

on an electric vehicle — and one cools

the electric motor and vehicle electronics.

The system for the passengers uses a bio-

ethanol powered heater that keeps pas-

sengers comfortable in winter but doesn’t

compromise driving range. It carries up to

14.5 liters of bio-ethanol.

For shorter trips, the battery pack itself can

be used to keep the car’s interior warm.

“The driver can program and control the

climate unit to suit the trip,” says Lennart

Stegland, director of Volvo Cars’ Special

Vehicles. “Ethanol is the default mode that

is used when the battery capacity is need-

ed for driving [to] extend mobility to its

maximum. However, on shorter distances,

electricity can be used to power the cli-

mate system.”

Volvo has been subjecting the C30 Electric

to rough winter conditions, making sure

it runs smoothly in temperatures as low

as minus 20 degrees Celsius, where that

bio-ethanol heater would definitely come

in handy.

ThePinnacleofcombustionengineefficiencyWhile much attention is being paid to

hybrid or all-electric vehicles, Silicon Val-

ley company Pinnacle Engines says inter-

nal combustion isn’t going away but can

be made better.

Pinnacle Engines plans to commercialize

a “breakthrough, ultra-efficient engine”

and market it worldwide, backed partly by

venture capital — it has raised $13.5 mil-

lion so far. The company plans to market

the engine through a licensing agreement

with an Asian vehicle original equipment

manufacturer that it hasn’t yet named.

The engine delivers 30 to 50 percent bet-

ter fuel economy without driving up cost

significantly, the company says. It uses

the Cleeves Cycle, developed by company

founder Monty Cleeves, which can alter

the combustion depending on conditions.

“This engine technology provides the

fuel economy and CO2 emissions of a hy-

brid at a price that the whole world can

afford,” Cleeves says.

Look for the engines under a vehicle hood

near you starting in early 2013.

High-techvaletcomestoChicagoA new Chicago garage will use robotic

technology to park cars, meaning valets

are less likely to go tearing around in your

Ferrari while you’re at the ballgame.

The Green Park Eco Garage, a fully au-

tomated parking structure that can hold

more than 100 vehicles, is slated to open in

the city’s Bucktown district by the end of

2011. The garage will use a robotic system

that doubles parking capacity compared

to a traditional parking structure.

The structure of the garage itself will

also help the city’s efforts to go green:

Developers are using recycled materials,

energy-efficient lighting and a “green”

rainwater-collecting roof to construct the

building in an eco-friendly manner. But

drivers will want to stay out of the garage

during the city’s cold winters; since only

cars will go into the garage, the developer

is leaving the interior completely unheat-

ed.

Watch a video of the sys-tem in action by scanning this barcode with your smartphone.


EssentialComponents— continued from page 7

Rethinkpossible:BMWsnext inslewofcarstogotelecomBMW is taking hands free to a whole new

level — the luxury automaker recently

teamed up with telecommunications

giant AT&T to create “an enhanced suite

of safety and infotainment services” that

will be available on future BMW models.

This kind of connectivity is advanced but

stands on the shoulders of a technology

suite BMWs already offer — BMW Assist,

which lets drivers access emergency and

concierge call services, gives them traffic

and weather information, news and fuel

prices.

Exactly what these “enhanced” services

are remains a mystery, but other always-

connected cars to recently hit the market

might hint at future BMW capabilities.

The Chevy Volt uses an OnStar app, avail-

able on Android, Blackberry and iPhone

to monitor its charging status and give

it a deadline for when you need the car’s

charge to be full. The app also starts the

car, locks or unlocks it and — in a move

that will make pocket dialing infuriate the

entire neighborhood — honk the horn.

The European model of the Nissan Leaf

uses wireless company Telenor Connexion

that allows a smartphone or even a PC to

access the car. Both systems help alleviate

a large issue with electric cars: their slow-

to-respond A/C and heating systems. Now

both can be started remotely.

CEO of Telenor Connexion Per Simonsen

says the company has agreements in place

with Volvo, Scania and Daimler for similar

systems.

Both the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, frontrunners of electric car technology, already offer remote access to the vehicles through smart phone apps. Photo courtesy Nissan.

Vision ConnectedDrive is only a BMW concept car, debuted at this year’s Geneva Motor Show, but imagines out con-nected vehicle technology to include full Internet access, along with many driver assist functions. Photo courtesy BMW.

RobotcarconnectsgamersanddriversA popular piece of gaming technology is

hitting the road.

Researchers at the University of Bundes-

wehr Munich in Germany have used the

Microsoft Kinect controller as a sensor in

a robotic car. The 1:10 scale vehicle has

the Kinect mounted at the front with a

Microsoft notebook riding on the back.

The vehicle uses a simplified version of the

software used by the university’s MuCar-3

from the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Researchers now plan to install an accurate

odometer in the vehicle.

Watch a video of the robotic car by scanning this barcode with your smartphone.


Q & a

Q: You have talked about the need toobtainautomotivelevelsofreliabilityinroboticsystems.Whatisthebestwaytoaccomplishthat?

A: Integration and testing, I should say

safe testing, and really testing to failure.

That’s a standard, traditional automotive

approach, testing to failure, doing root

cause analysis and going back and prov-

ing it and then re-implementing it and re-

integrating it into the platform.

Q: TARDEC has worked for years onrobotic convoy technologies aimedat reducing thenumberofpeopleneeded tologistics resupply.What’s thestatusof thatwork,includingontheConvoyActiveSafetyTechnology(CAST)effort?

A: The CAST program has been in

existence about four years. We’ve had

some LOE, limited objective experiments,

around the United States where we were

specifically doing the data collection, and

more from the standpoint of a couple of

focus control groups. So we would have

drivers who would be doing a task, and

they were tasked like, we want to do long

haul, so just driving in a repetitive, boring,

loop for hours on end and then still being

able to do some cognitive tasks, being able

to report out, recognize objects on the side

of the road, these kind of things, versus a

group that had the capability to actually

implement the leader-following capabil-

ity into the vehicle and then checking the

same thing. And we’ve seen significant, sig-

nificant increases in the ability to keep the

attention and the focus on the road and

be able to take the gaze from road driving

and actually be able to start recognizing

things or objects of interest on the sides of

the road. So definitely ... in benign envi-

ronments, where you do get some of the

worst drowsy driver, highway hypnosis-

type maladies with the driver, this works.

It certainly does work.

Now we’re trying to consistently drive the

costs per unit down, and we’ve got it down

to something like $20,000-30,000, but

even that’s too expensive. But we know we

can do this, and we’ve done some night

ops, we’ve done multiple trains, … we’re

looking at Jeeps, we’re looking at M113s,

so we’re looking at how we can put those

together. It’s still almost exclusively a driv-

er in the driver’s seat, although we do have

the capability to operate one vehicle from

another if we need to.

Q: Inthenearterm,doyouforeseethistechnology aimed more at assistingdrivers thangetting themoutof thevehiclecompletely?

A: I think so. There’s lots of reasons for

that. As much as I understand the technol-

ogy and am confident in the technology,

you can’t have a 100 percent reliable sys-

tem. But I still think the best way to really

move this forward is incrementally, and

incrementally in all aspects, not just tech-

nology but even the concept of operations.

I think incrementally, I don’t want to do a

wholesale change where I’m taking opera-

tors totally out of the vehicles. Let’s leave

them in the vehicles, but now let’s provide

this like a driver’s aid, a driver’s assist. Let’s

get some confidence in the technology,

some real trust in it, and let’s get people so

used to it that we can declare success when

they complain about a vehicle that doesn’t

have it.

Q: When do you think this technologywillbeusedinthefield?

A: I would imagine that we’re going to

look at some serious testing of this prob-

ably in theater, whether it’s in Iraq or Af-

ghanistan, but I imagine we’ll see some

limited testing on this probably within

the next two years if not sooner. I know

there are some talks about it going out and

being tested, again in a safe manner. Me

personally, I would like to see it happen

faster. I think the technology exists now,

and it’s one of the programs that I’d like

to see move forward where we start testing

these again in some kind of safe manner

for actually CONUS military, so we have

OCONUS, the overseas, and CONUS, the

continental United States.

Q: Are you getting any resistance frompeople in the military to this tech-nology?

A: I think they like it. We really have to

flesh it out because … it’s the proverbial,

‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at

a time.’ You look at all the things this tech-

nology could do, and you’ve just got to fo-

cus on one thing. So I don’t think anybody

is necessarily resisting it, it’s just a matter

of let’s get a truly focused plan, lay this out

as strategy, so to speak, on how this par-

ticular convoying could be realized and

moved out.

What I’m talking about is potentially im-

plementing these on military bases, so now

are we not only talking about the soldier,

but we’re talking about the military family

and the military community. We’re look-

ing at, can we expose a whole different seg-

ment of the population ... and in order to

Dr. James Overholt is director of the Joint Center for Robotics at U.S. Army Research and Development Com-mand (RDECOM)-Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC). He has worked with TARDEC for more that 25 years. He recently also completed an eight-month detail assignment as the systems and control program manager at the Army Research Office in Durham, N.C. Mission Critical caught up with him at the recent annual symposium sponsored by AUVSI’s Pathfinder Chapter in Huntsville, Ala.


Q&A— continued from page 9

get that kind of permission we’re going to

have to be able to show those people that

make the decisions that, OK, these guys are

going to run these safely, and you’re always

kind of balancing that with you don’t want

to have something so safe that you won’t

be able to push the boundaries. So it re-

ally is an interesting balancing act between

total safety and being able to push out on

the abilities of intelligent technologies be-

ing integrated in.

Q: You’re talking about ARIBO, whichwouldtestvariousroboticsystemsonmilitarybases?

A: It’s a notion of, let’s set up a living

laboratory — again, safe — where we

test intelligent vehicles on our roads, do-

ing some real simple functions, putting

hours and miles on these vehicles to un-

derstand when they work, when they don’t

work. When they do work, test to failure,

and when they don’t work, we bring that

information back, we work with the inte-

grators and providers ... and say, ‘OK, let’s

make it better.’ And then get it right back

out there and test it again. So the notion

is, let’s do robots in our buildings, let’s do

robots on our roads and let’s do robots

on our perimeters for security. It makes a

lot of sense to be able to do that. It’s just

a matter of getting the program fired up,

and I think there are a lot of long-term

benefits that we could realize from doing

that activity.

Q: You’reworkingonconvoytechnology,andEuropeandJapanareworkingon“platooning”efforts,wherethere isa lead,human-drivenvehiclethatcancontrolastringofcarsbehind it.Doyouthinkplatooning isgoingtobethewaythatsomeofthistechnol-ogyfirstgetsoutontotheroad?

A: I think so. … Is there real gain in the

sort term and the long term? My gut feel-

ing is there probably will be, but I think

the numbers will hopefully prove that

out. But I can see that happening here in a

short period of time.

Japan is really looking at it as a national

effort. Cutting down on CO2 emission is

really significant. There are lots of differ-

ent ways of doing it but as it turns out, it

comes down to if you can start reducing

fuel consumption, you cut down on CO2

emissions. … If they [the Japanese] could

integrate those technologies into these ro-

botic convoys, they could realize as much

as a 10 percent CO2 reduction. So it’s real-

ly remarkable technology that’s wide rang-

ing — it’s safer, it’s potentially greener and

it allows us to do a lot more functionality

with the vehicles.

Q: Whereareweintermsoftechnology,say specifically regarding convoyingorplatooning?

A: We are pretty good at doing line of

sight. From an autonomy standpoint,

and there’s a lot of different people doing

things, there’s a wide range, and it’s a dif-

ficult problem to look at ... but I can say

with a good deal of confidence that we’re

pretty good at operating in benign envi-

ronments without a lot of people around

on unstructured roadways. We can do

that. We’re so good at it because also we’re

far enough away from humans that we

don’t run necessarily into the safety issues.

So from an autonomy standpoint, there

are certain realms and regions we’re really

good at. We have to move out in other ar-

eas.

Q: What connection do you have withthe automotive industry in terms ofswappingideasorsystems?

A: The Detroit auto industry has fallen

on hard times the last few years. Our lab at

TARDEC, in some ways, reaped the benefit

of it. We hired some amazing folks from

the automotive industry. One of the things

that they brought to the table was a totally

different perspective on military robotics.

You’re so engaged in this area for so many

years, it is great to get a refreshing look at it,

so we have some great people who under-

stand the tech from their end, and they’ve

been introducing me more and more, and

introducing our group within the Army, to

what’s going on in the auto industry and

the tiered suppliers especially, in robust

cheap componentry, in what they’re doing

in terms of vehicle-vehicle architectures.

Q: Whatwilltheworld’sroadslooklikeinthefuture,say2050?

A: I don’t know if you saw ‘Minority Re-

port,’ I don’t think we’ll be at that point

where cars are going 150 miles per hour,

but … there are some regulatory issues

happening that in my opinion are seminal

in the field.

I think in 2012, at some point in 2012, all

cars sold in the United States under 10,000

pounds gross vehicle weight will have an

electronic stability package on them. And

that to me is a seminal moment. It means

the technology has matured to such a level

that there is trust in it. The technology is

there that now will take some of the so-to-

speak driving functions out of the hands

of the users, particularly in emergency

situations. I could see us having [a] ve-

hicle system, especially in populated areas,

where you’ll have anti-collision. ... I think

you’ll see a rebirth, in some sense, of the

urban areas that are somewhat catalyzed

by what’s going on in intelligent electron-

ics, software, into vehicles. I think it will

start bringing people more into the cities.

Now from the military standpoint … cer-

tainly the amount of intelligence we’re

going to see in these vehicles is going to

increase. I think we will see some level of

autonomy. I think you will see weaponry

on vehicles. I think that is a coming thing

that we as a military community have to

grapple with. … I think you’re going to

see in a very short time period the ability

to have a few controllers, multiple robots.

And I think that kind of swarming, team-

ing behavior between robotic entities is

really an exciting and intriguing area that

could be a significant force multiplier for

the military in general.


Amazingrace: blind, but now able to drive BYDANIELLELUCEY

For the first time in history, blind driver

is not an insult.”

Fesh from the driver’s seat, face still

flush, Mark Riccobono’s first words to the

press and attendees from the National Fed-

eration of the Blind brought laughs and a

room full of applause.

Riccobono had just turned what some

consider a joke into reality, becoming

the first blind driver to ever go around

the racetrack at Daytona International

Speedway.

A precursor to the Rolex 24 — a 24-hour

Grand-Am feat of driver endurance — the

Blind Driver Challenge was the brainchild

of the NFB, whose members have spent

more than a decade waiting for their goal

to be achieved.

You don’t need to see to appreciate racing

at Daytona. Huge wafts of gasoline and

burning rubber hang in the air each time

a car blasts by grandstands, which hold

the nearly 400 members of the NFB who

turned out from all over the country for

the event. And then there’s the noise: When

the speed of the cars out for the Rolex 24

race hit that wall in the crowd’s ears, Dop-

pler shifting from an impending roar to a

passing whiz, the speed and pure muscle

of what’s in front of them is evident.

For the NFB, the January event was about

proving what they’ve always known: You

don’t need to see to appreciate driving.

What members did need was a little help

and ingenuity from some friends in the

robotics community to make that pos-

sible. The NFB issued a call to action to

all American universities, and experts

Virginia Tech and TORC Technologies

answered. Using technology from the

DARPA Urban Challenge, TORC Tech-

nologies took its ByWire XGV roboti-

cized Ford Escape and coupled it with

Mark Riccobono becomes the first driver to loop the track at Daytona International Speedway. Photo courtesy NFB.

Base PlatformProblem Solved

Ethernet Interface

Full Support & Documentation

Intelligent Power Distribution

Proven Hybrid Platform

Integrated Safety System

6 kW Power Supply

request a free consultationto see if the ByWire XGV is the right

fit for your next robotics project

“...the obvious choice was TORC Technologies’ ByWire XGV solution.”

- UC Berkeley

540.443.9262torctech.com

Base Vehicle

Drive-by-Wire System

Power Options


BlindDriverChallenge— continued from page 11

Virginia Tech’s driver feedback inventions

to turned robotic autonomy into personal

autonomy, for the first time enabling blind

people to drive.

MarkLike most blind people, Riccobono never

imagined that he would be able to drive.

Riccobono, 34, has been legally blind,

meaning he only had 10 percent of nor-

mal vision, since he was 5 years old due

to a congenital eye condition. He contin-

ued to lose his vision as he got older and

was completely blind in his left eye by

age 13. Though he is still partially sighted

in his right eye, Riccobono says it’s only

colors and shapes.

“There was no prospect of being a driver;

there was no thought of being a driver. I

put the idea out of my head,” Riccobono

says of the year he turned 16, usually the

time when kids reach for the keys. He relies

on carpools to get to work and uses public

transportation to get his four-year-old son

Austin to daycare every morning.

The NFB got on Riccobono’s radar when

he attended the University of Wisconsin

Madison in the mid-1990s.

“I didn’t know any real tips or tricks or al-

ternative techniques that blind people use,”

says Riccobono. Unable to read Braille,

Riccobono says he was “really struggling”

when he came across NFB’s Madison af-

filiate. Interest piqued, he attended the

national convention that year in Anaheim,

Calif.

“I found a whole network of people that

were willing to challenge me to go beyond

where I thought I could,” he says. Ricco-

bono rose through the ranks, becoming

the Wisconsin location’s president from

1998 to 2003 before accepting the position

of executive director of research and train-

ing programs at NFB’s national headquar-

ters in Baltimore, Md.

NFB’s headquarters is fairly large, about

100 employees. Riccobono spends his days

interacting with members and coworkers,

and through the use of innovative technol-

ogies, his typical day is pretty standard.

He uses a standard PC with a screen-access

software, which reads what’s on his desk-

top out loud to him, that lets him inter-

act with email, the Internet and Microsoft

Word. He navigates a page using keyboard

commands instead of a mouse. He keeps

print documents on his desk, some in

Braille and some that his assistant reads to

him. Through a software that NFB helped

develop through a spinoff company, called

K-NFB Reader Mobile, Riccobono’s cell

phone is outfitted with a camera that can

read what it sees to him.

“Wherever I am, I can read using this tech-

nology,” he says. He can write hardcopy

notes in Braille through a slate and stylus

he carries with him.

For the last decade there have been rum-

blings inside the NFB of increasing the

autonomy of blind people in outside-of-

the-box ways. Putting a blind driver be-

hind the wheel of a car was first pitched in

2001 at an NFB national conference by the

organization’s president Marc Maurer.

“Eleven years ago, we started talking about

the blind driver,” said Maurer at the Day-

tona event to a crowd of NFB members,

worked up to fever pitch by a man they

clearly revere. “Building an automobile the

blind could use, and they said we couldn’t

do it. … When we started thinking about

what blind people can’t do, how many of

us have said the first thing is that we can’t

drive? And we thought about our inde-

pendence and what we could do to make

the world better, and we built the idea that

we would bring together inspiration and

technology.

“And today, to all of those to said it was

just a stunt, and to all of those that said

we couldn’t, and to all of those who said

that it would never happen, we say you just

watch us move.”

It is under Maurer’s reign that the national

Riccobono lost almost all of his sight by age 13. Photo courtesy NFB.

We thought about our

independence and what

we could do to make the

world better, and we built

the idea that we would

bring together inspiration

and technology.

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- UC Berkeley

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headquarters broke ground on its new

Jernigan Institute in 2004, a facility fo-

cused on advancing technology to increase

the independence of the blind.

“It was just part of the visionary set of

things that was being talked about,” says

Riccobono. The foundation set its time-

line for driving, among its other goals, in

the 25-year time range, he says. But the

opening of the institute in 2004 marked a

switch from talk to action.

“That was the first time it was apparent

that it was a little more serious than just

a bold vision,” he says. In 2004, the NFB

pursued universities to work on the chal-

lenge.

GettingsetMichael Fleming has been working in the

robotics industry since college. He got his

start as a student at Virginia Tech, where

he got both his bachelor’s and master’s in

mechanical engineering. He went on to

work as a research associate for the col-

lege. Fleming was inspired to start his own

company after realizing that much of the

university’s technology wasn’t being used

in real-world applications.

“I came to conclusion with some of my

colleagues that we had all this great tech-

nology, but unfortunately the technology

wasn’t going anywhere,” said Fleming in

an interview with Virginia Tech. “When

the graduate students would leave, they

would leave a thesis, and that technology

was not being ported to address critical

needs that we see within society.”

In 2006, with the help of Blacksburg, Va.’s

VT KnowledgeWorks — an entrepreneur-

ial incubation program for the Virginia

Tech community — Fleming secured a

spot for TORC in the Virginia Tech Cor-

porate Research Center (CRC). The com-

pany is still located there five years later,

having grown from four employees to

nearly 30.

TORC focuses on empowering other

engineers by offering a suite of modular

and easy-to-use products that can be used

to more rapidly customize, integrate, and

deploy safe and reliable robotic systems.

Its products are now used by leading

academic, commercial and government

organizations to shorten the development

process, lower costs and mitigate develop-

ment risks.

In the mid-2000s DARPA, the mad scien-

tists of the Department of Defense’s array

of agencies, began a series of high-profile

unmanned ground vehicle competitions

Virginia Tech students test out the roboticized Ford Escape before the Blind Driver Challenge. AUVSI photo.



designed to build the bridge between re-

search and real-life, working autonomous

systems.

In its last feat, the 2007 Urban Challenge,

DARPA tasked innovators to come up

with a way that a completely autonomous

car could navigate a 60-mile urban area

course. Stop lights, traffic, obstacles and

all, the participants had a six-hour win-

dow to complete the course.

Eighty-nine teams from around the globe

competed to win the glory and prize

money of the Urban Challenge. Under-

grad and graduate students from Virginia

Tech joined up with TORC to form Team

VictorTango for the competition. Averag-

ing just about one mile per hour slower

than the top team, VictorTango placed

third.

The competition vehicle, a modified 2005

Ford Escape Hybrid, was the same plat-

form used for the Blind Driver Challenge.

TORC helped create all the software

that allowed the Escape to autonomously

navigate.

“The [Blind Driver Challenge] vehicle has

its roots in the DARPA Urban Challenge

technology. The new challenge was adding

a blind driver in the loop,” says Andrew

Culhane, business development manager

at TORC. “We were able to insert several

TORC products on day one to get us 80

percent there — the remaining 20 percent

was the tricky part, communicating with

Virginia Tech’s nonvisual interfaces.”

The ByWire XGV is a packaged vehicle

conversion that includes TORC’s By-

Wire modules, which allow for computer

control and monitoring of the vehicle’s

systems, the SafeStop wireless emergency

stop system and PowerHub power man-

agement and distribution modules neces-

sary to power the additional components,

sensors, computers and technologies

adding to the system.

Light detection and ranging (lidar) scan-

ners on the vehicle detect objects by send-

ing out thousands of light pulses. The

return light establishes distance, and those

thousands of light points determine the

profile of an object or negative space.

The camera looks at those pixels from the

lidar and populates them with color that

helps classify the environment. The soft-

ware then takes that image and tries to

predict what those objects are doing in real

time — it’s essentially the same way eyes

and the brain work together.

As for the additional hardware, a combi-

nation of scanning laser rangefinders and

machine vision cameras were added to

provide real-time sensory input.

All of this information gets fused together

with data from a GPS unit, which works

with TORC’s autonomous navigation soft-

ware and finally passes the information

back to the driver through the Virginia

Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Labora-

tory’s nonvisual interfaces.

But it was not the XGV alone that pow-

ered Riccobono’s car. He had to actually

maneuver the vehicle himself.

Students at Virginia Tech masterminded

the key pieces missing for this odd retro-

fit — turning an autonomous vehicle back

into a manned car, but a manned car that

still uses all the same software as a robotic

vehicle to help make decisions.

The students took to task, working under

Virginia Tech professor Dennis Hong.

They came up with two innovations,

technologies that would give Riccobono

feedback as he was driving the car. The

technologies didn’t force him to perform

a task, but told him what to do.

The SpeedStrip interface sent vibrations up and down Riccobono’s back, letting him know how much to accelerate or decelerate. AUVSI photo.


Through a senior design project, the stu-

dents developed haptic sensors — devices

that provide touch sensation — that would

steer Riccobono in the right direction.

Four of the eight seniors sent to the Day-

tona event worked on SpeedStrip, a pad

the driver sits on that gives him informa-

tion on his acceleration. The interface uses

vibrations up and down the driver’s legs

and back to let him feel how fast to drive.

When that speed is neared, the vibration

slows to a stop. The students started work

on the device in 2006.

The second interface that involved the

other four seniors was DriveGrip, a pair of

fingerless gloves that send vibrations down

the driver’s fingers, which was designed in

the last year. A soft right turn would send

a vibration to Riccobono’s right pointer

finger, and a harder right turn would go

across more of his right-hand fingers.

Like SpeedStrip, once the car is correctly

oriented, the vibration stops. The gloves

initially experienced wire fatigue when

the students tested them, so they replaced

them with wire cables, like the ones used

on a computer.

GoVirginia Tech and TORC tested the vehicle

for two days in December at the Virginia

International Raceway. The NFB tested on

its own in Baltimore using simulators that

the students sent headquarters.

The simulators were about getting used

to the nonvisual interfaces and how they

communicate information to a blind

driver, says Riccobono. The simulators

were equipped with video game pedals,

DriveGrip and SpeedStrip.

“The limitation of the simulator is of

course you do get valuable information

from getting in the driver’s seat,” says

Riccobono. “The noise of the engine, there

are all these environmental cues you pick

up on.”

Though a simulator can’t give that kind

if information, Riccobono says it was

valuable to get a sense of the interfaces.

And what testing on the simulator lacked

in real-world feel, it made up for in safety,

he continues.

Multiple people tested on the simulators

so the NFB could downselect to one driver

for the Daytona race day.

“We’ve had varying success,” says Ricco-

bono. “Some people have very low per-

centage [accuracy] on their first run, being

in the lane and on target, but some actu-

ally do very, very well on their first try.” It

shows that Virginia Tech’s technology is

intuitive, says Riccobono, but that training

on any new device is also necessary.

Locking up the deal to drive the real system

at Daytona before the Rolex 24 Grand-Am

Virginia Tech engineered DriveGrip to let the driver know which direction and how hard to turn. They’re looking to continue improve on interfaces in the coming year. AUVSI photo.

race was surprisingly easy, he says.

“The whole team, Grand-Am, they run

the race, but the Daytona international

Speedway team [is] also a tremendous

team of folks,” he says. “Not one person we

met said, ‘Well, what do you mean you’re

going to bring a blind person out here?’

They bought into the vision. And it just

shows that they have imagination, be-

cause we certainly didn’t expect it to be as

friendly, open, warm, when we said, ‘Hey,

we want a blind person to drive on your

track.’”

Riccobono tested at Daytona only during

the week of the race.

“Daytona had a parking lot that they al-

lowed us to use, and we did some testing

…some actually do very, very well on their first try. It shows

that Virginia Tech’s technology is intuitive…

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in a parking lot, mostly it was just to make

sure, to keep the driver in shape and to test

the system, test some of the things we were

doing in the demo,” says Riccobono.

The day before the Blind Driver Challenge,

a number of NFB members showed up to

the test parking lot, and Riccobono drove

them around in what he calls the first blind

driver taxi service.

Most meaningful to Riccobono was being

able to take his wife and two children on

their very first family drive.

“The first family road trip,” says Riccon-

bono, “and it was wonderful — a really

moving experience personally to make

that realization that for the first time I

could strap my family in and take them

somewhere on my own direction.”

The day of the race was “a little nerve

wracking,” he said. A few hours before the

challenge, Riccobono joined the 400 mem-

bers of the NFB and spoke with some of

the group, which put him at ease, he says.

“I was really at peace at that point. It was

actually much more nerve wracking wait-

ing to get out to the car.”

Once he was on the track, “it was about the

moment,” he says. “It was about showing

really the achievement of the vision and

the work that we had put in.”

Driving at speeds up to 30 miles per hour,

Riccobono drove around the track at

Daytona, dodging cones and barrels and

avoiding boxes being thrown out of a van

in front of his car.

“The truth is I was so focused it just

seemed, well at the beginning it seemed

very slow, much slower than I expected.

Maybe I was driving a little slower because

I wanted to be right on, but once I hit that

International Horse Shoe [the infield track

section at Daytona], that was really the key

moment for me.”

Riccobono aced the course.

Though the Blind Driver Challenge proved

that robotic technology could enable driv-

ers that need assistance, Riccobono says

the NFB’s relationship with TORC is likely

not over.

“We think the guys at TORC are great, and

they’ve done great work with us,” he says.

And Virginia Tech isn’t done innovating

new ways to make blind drivers a reality.

The students are now working on Air-

Pix, a third interface that outputs tactile

information through small holes, much

like how air blows through a table hockey

board. That device may cut down on the

numbing effect a driver would experi-

ence after a long time of using an interface

like DriveGrip — much like how motor-

cyclists’ hands grow numb after hours of

vibration.

The next step for the NFB is to build out

the challenge, says Riccobono, getting

more universities engaged and finding

funding to continue academic research.

“The ideal would be to have a series of

challenge events where universities could

enter their interfaces,” he says. Then they

could have a series of blind drivers test the

technology at once. “At some point, we’d

love to have a race.” n

Danielle LuceyismanagingeditorofMission Critical.

TORC Technology’s ByWire XGV system turns any manned vehicle into a robotic platform. AUVSI photo.

…for the first time I could

strap my family in and take

them somewhere on my own

direction.

· Discounts on Exhibits, Sponsorships, Advertisingand AUVSI Products

· Access to Members Only networking, education and Select VIP Events

· Listing in Unmanned Systems Magazineand AUVSI’s Online Directory

· Complimentary Job Listings onAUVSI’s Online Career Center

· Research reports and knowledge sharing through AUVSI’s OnlineCommunity

· Chapters and Regions around the Globe

Join today at www.auvsi.org/membership



full page membership ad Dec2010 12/9/10 10:15 PM Page 1

To watch a video of the Blind Driver Challenge, scan this barcode with your smartphone.


Innovations come from all over the world. Here is a graphical look at how different places around the globe stack up in terms of autonomous vehicle technology. Look for more in-depth stories on places followed by an asterisk.

Parma,ItalyParma University’s VisLab took up

its own Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge in 2010, logging in a

15,000-kilometer autonomous caravan trip tracing the ancient spice route

from Italy to Shanghai, China. The first vehicle drove somewhat autonomously,

with occasional human intervention, and a follower vehicle was close

behind, tracking the leader with visual and GPS information.

state of the artArlington,Va.*

AUVSI heads the Transportation Technology Transfer Initiative (T3I)

to facilitate the transfer of intelligent vehicle technology between the

Department of Defense and the civil transportation sector.

Hannover,GermanyGotting KG demonstrated leader-follower technology

using a Smart car and a tractor at the CeBIT Computer Fair

in 2009 as part of its Gotting Konvoi concept, and is seeking partners for follow-on work for low-speed, off-road convoys in

areas like mining pits.

Victorville,Calif., andtheMojaveDesert

The DARPA Urban Challenge and prior pair of Grand Challenges set the stage for autonomous vehicles

one day becoming reality.

HH

PikesPeakNot only did Audi take its Autonomous

TTS research car up this epic incline late last year, it went there quickly. The 12.42-mile

course was completed in 27 minutes. Not bad compared to a manned 17-minute ascension. The research car was a joint effort between Volkswagen/Audi, Stanford University and

software company Oracle.

H

MountainView,Calif.*Google’s headquarters, where the company started testing its autonomous Priuses in October. (Mission Critical realizes the true

plural is Prii, but does anyone actually say that?)

HDaytonaBeach,Fla.*

The National Federation of the Blind, TORC Technologies and

Virginia Tech demonstrated the first ever Blind Driver Challenge in early 2011.

H

H

H


Gothenberg,Sweden*The site of Volvo’s Sartre autonomous road train

concept testing.

Berlin,GermanyFreie University Berlin’s AutoNomos project has sprouted a different kind of connected vehicle: one that latches

into your brain. BrainDriver, though not road-ready yet, uses human-machine

interfaces that could allow your electric-magnetic signals to send a

car where you want it to go.

AbuDhabi,UAEThe Tourist Club Area, like most other places in Abu Dhabi, is packed with cars and people, making transportation a chore.

To relieve some of the street congestion outside one of its parking garages, Abu Dhabi Commercial Properties started

using a robotic parking garage. A robotic platform places newly

dropped off cars in a large stacking system and keeps

track of all of the cars’ locations through cameras tracking license

plate numbers.

Shanghai,ChinaGM debuted its autonomous car con-cept, EN-V at last year’s World Expo 2010 Shanghai. The name is sort for Electric Networked-Vehicle, and the

concept aims to transform urban trans-portation. The autonomous two-wheeled car for two could one day cut down on traffic and parking availability issues if its vehicle-to-vehicle communication

method catches on.

Tokyo,JapanCompany ZMP, headquartered in Toyko, will begin selling an auton-omous vehicle this year for around US $84,000. Though it looks more like a golf cart than a BMW, ZMP is moving autonomous transportation into the hands of consumers faster

than most thought possible.

Adelaide,AustraliaMAGIC 2010 proved that robotic com-

munication is a reality, with winning Team Michigan using 14 robots that collaborated with simple barcode scanning technology.

Though not full-sized vehicles, this type of communication is paramount to many

autonomous vehicle concepts.

H

H

HH

H

HH

H


Cartalk:Thescienceandpoliticsbehindvehiclesthattalktoeachotherandtotheroadways

BYSTEPHANIELEVY

“Here I am!”

This small declarative statement could

soon become a rallying cry for a new

generation of vehicles that help their

driver avoid crashes, save gas and redefine

transportation as we know it.

It’s a start to a new reality in which vehicles

rely on connected and cooperative systems

to communicate with the road and each

other, making driving safer. It’s the idea

that seems counterintuitive at first, but

has the data to back it up: By taking hu-

man error out of operating vehicles, more

human lives can be saved each year, along

with gasoline and wear and tear. It cuts

CO2 emissions as well.

For now, “Here I am!” is the first step in

establishing and deploying vehicles with

vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to

infrastructure (V2I) technologies.

“It’s sending out information about

where a vehicle is and where it’s heading,”

says Mike Schagrin, program manager at

the U.S. Department of Transportation’s

Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint

Program Office. “It’s not about who the

passengers are or who the vehicle is, but

where it is, so other equipped vehicles can

pick it up and know a vehicle is there.”

That’s the V2V part; V2I has the vehicle

communicating with infrastructure at

critical and often dangerous places — in-

tersections. For instance, a traffic light

could tell an approaching vehicle when

it’s going to turn red. Depending on how

much time it has, the vehicle could either

decide to continue on or alert its driver

that it’s time to start slowing down.

The Department of Transportation calls

all this “connected vehicle” research, where

the vehicles can talk to each other and to

the infrastructure on which they move.

“For the vehicle-to-vehicle testing, we

have a lot of research that’s geared towards

The basic rallying cry of the connected vehicle: “Here I am!”All images courtesy the U.S. Department of Transportation.


Cartalk— continued from page 23

deployment that’s going on right now,”

Schagrin says. “This is a multi-modal

effort across the Department” that in-

cludes the National Highway Traffic

Safety Administration, Research and

Innovative Technology Administration,

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administra-

tion, Federal Transit Administration and

Federal Highway Administration. “We are

also working very closely with the auto in-

dustry under partnership agreements,” he

says.

”We have reached the stage of having

some fairly mature technology and have

demonstrated the capability in numerous

venues.”

WirelessIn V2V communication, a “here I am”

automated signal emanates wirelessly

from a vehicle, allowing it to interact with

other vehicles on the road. Should a situ-

ation arise where there is a risk of a vehi-

cle-to-vehicle collision, the vehicle would

issue a warning to the driver so the driver

can try to avoid the collision.

“The kind of warning that we found was

optimal was a combination of visual, au-

dible and haptic, like a seatbelt tightening

or seat vibrating,” Schagrin says. “That

actually proved to be very effective in our

limited trials.”

In January, at Washington, D.C.’s Robert

F. Kennedy Memorial stadium, DOT offi-

cials took part in a test ride in Ford-built

vehicles equipped with a Wi-Fi like sys-

tem.

“In the demonstration, Administrator

[Peter] Appel and Deputy Assistant Sec-

retary [Brodi] Fontenot endured several

hair-raising potential crash scenarios,” says

the official blog of Ray LaHood, the U.S.

Secretary of Transportation. “And from

potential crash scenario to potential crash

scenario, the new technology alerted the

driver before it was too late and in ways

our current vehicles simply cannot do.”

Saferchickens crossingtheroadIntelligent cars and trucks may be able to talk to each other and refrain from running into each other, but there is still the issue of vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents and collisions, as human beings remain low-tech and don’t yet come with “here I am” technology installed.

The U.S. DOT’s Mike Schagrin says that while the Department of Transportation is conducting some studies on this issue, it is not the main focus of their current research. However, the technol-ogy to reduce vehicle crashes could also be extended to vehicle-pedestrian crashes.

“One area that we are now investigating is in the area of transit. Pedestrian crashes don’t happen all that frequently, but when they do they’re very newsworthy,” Schagrin says. “We are put-ting some resources into how we recognize the pedestrian.”

PreviousresearchA 2001 study from the U.S. Department of Transportation Fed-eral Highway Administration found that automated pedestrian detectors at intersections increase pedestrian awareness while decreasing vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes. The systems can detect the presence of people and activate the “Walk” sign without the pedestrians having to push a button.

The study took place in three cities — Los Angeles, Phoenix and Rochester, N.Y. — and defined vehicle-to-pedestrian “conflicts” as “any pedestrian-motorist interaction in which either the pedestrian or the motorist stops or slows down so that the other can proceed.”

With automated pedestrian detection devices in place, the num-ber of vehicle-to-pedestrian conflicts when a pedestrian began crossing the street fell by a whopping 89 percent; conflicts at the end of a pedestrian’s walk fell by 42 percent. These traf-fic systems also decreased the number of conflicts associated with right-turning vehicles by 40 percent and reduced all “other” types of conflicts by 76 percent.


Schagrin says the current V2V technologies

can address up to 80 percent of all possible

dangerous traffic scenarios. Drivers would

start to see these benefits on the road when

as few as 8-10 percent of vehicles use V2V

technologies. Schagrin explains that the

more vehicles that use these systems, the

more drivers will reap the benefits.

“The cost itself isn’t terribly great, it’s a

simple electronic device, but the issue with

the vehicle-to-vehicle scenario is you have

to have multiple vehicles equipped that are

within range of each other to start getting

the benefits,” Schagrin says. “When you

get more and more penetration, you cre-

ate greater benefits.”

ThestateofsmarttechnologiesIn a 2009 presentation at the Intelligent

Vehicle Technology Transfer (IVTT) Joint

Military/Civilian Workshop on IntelliD-

rive (the former name of the DOT’s con-

nected vehicle effort), Tim Schmidt, chief

technology officer for the DOT, explained

the system as “a suite of technologies and

applications that use wireless communica-

tions to provide connectivity.” Through

sensors, processors, software and com-

munications technology in vehicles, infra-

structure and control centers, DOT and its

government and industry partners aim to

create this connectivity with and between

vehicles, infrastructure and wireless con-

sumer devices.

The Department of Transportation sup-

ports connected vehicle research because

of the solutions it offers to current traffic

problems such as safety, mobility and en-

vironmental consequences. For instance,

there are 6 million car crashes annually

in the United States, leading to more than

30,000 deaths each year and a direct eco-

nomic cost of $230 billion. Connected ve-

hicle technologies are designed to increase

drivers’ situational awareness and reduce

or eliminate these devastating crashes.

“You don’t need to have every vehicle

equipped in order for benefits to start being

generated,” Schagrin says. “You can start

saving lives right away. As the adoption of

the technology becomes greater, more and

more lives are going to be saved.”

The economic consequences of conges-

tion on U.S. roadways is also staggering;

between 4.2 billion lost work hours and

2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel, traffic

congestion leads to a $78 billion annual

drain on the economy. Therefore, one of

the goals of connected vehicle research is

to achieve transformational system per-

formance of surface transportation net-

works.

In-vehicle devices will use V2V technology to alert drivers of dangerous situations.

“The present data suggest that automated pedestrian detectors can provide significant operational and safety benefits when in-stalled in conjunction with conventional pedestrian push buttons at actuated traffic signals,” the report says.

The study theorized that automated pedestrian detectors are suc-cessful because of the increase in likelihood that a pedestrian will receive the “Walk” signal. These signals ensure a minimum amount of time for pedestrians to cross the street.

PuffinsandPussycatsCountries around the world have already put this safety informa-tion to some use. In 1993, the United Kingdom’s Puffin (Pedes-trian User-Friendly Intelligent) crossings responded to pedestrian demand without creating unnecessary traffic delays. The United Kingdom later introduced similar technologies to Australia and Sweden.

In the Netherlands the Pussycat (Pedestrian Urban Safety System and Comfort At Traffic Signals) system used a pressure-sensitive

mat to detect pedestrians waiting to cross the street and then infrared sensors across the intersection to detect crossing pedes-trians. The study says it had mixed results.

“Although pedestrians perceived Pussycats to be at least as safe as the old system, many pedestrians reported that they did not understand the functions of the mat,” the report said. “As may as half of all pedestrians refused to use the system.”

Going forward from this study, researchers hope to find out if the benefits of automatic detection outweigh the cost. Research-ers also aim to study a possible correlation between a reduction in inappropriate crossings (think jaywalking) and a reduction in vehicle-to-passenger conflicts or crashes.

“More evaluations of this type are recommended to better understand the operational constraints of new technologies being applied for the first time in the pedestrian environment,” the report says. Looking at such applications is part of the Federal Highway Administration’s 15-year Pedestrian Safety Strategic Plan.

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VOLUNTEER, MENTOR, DONATELearn how you can support our studentautonomous vehicle competitions, mentor K-12 students, and fund programs that willbring hands-on robotic activities to schools and youth groups across the country. Visit www.auvsifoundation.org for moreinformation or to make a donation online.*The AUVSI Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit,charitable organization. All donations are tax-deductible.

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2011 Foundation competition ad 2/11/11 1:09 PM Page 1


“It’s all part of the interoperability work

where we have to make sure the data com-

ing out of one vehicle or device is usable

by another,” Schagrin says.

Finally, cars and trucks currently make up

22 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions

in the atmosphere, making them the sec-

ond largest source for carbon dioxide pol-

lution, behind factories. Connected vehicle

research can address the issue of the nearly

three billion gallons of wasted fuel in cur-

rent car models by maintaining vehicles at

maximum fuel efficiency and informing

travelers to make more fuel-efficient and

eco-friendly travel decisions.

“I don’t think there are any major technol-

ogy gaps right now for us to be able to do

this,” Schagrin says.

PartnersintransportationDOT has carried out a variety of projects

related to connected vehicles, efforts that

have included public agency and industry

partners.

Michigan, no stranger to automotive

transportation, has aimed at having a key

role in the U.S. DOT’s overall connected

vehicle efforts, and “playing a lead role in

advancing smart technologies to connect

vehicles and roadway” infrastructure is

a central component of the state’s long-

range (2005-2030) transportation plan.

Aside from the nationwide benefits in

safety, efficiency and pollution control, it’s

good local business: Department research

showed that an aggressive push in the re-

search and development of V2V and V2I

technologies could help create 16,000 jobs

statewide.

The state has “numerous” test facilities for

the work according to a July 2010 white pa-

per prepared by the Center for Automotive

Research. Among these is a U.S. DOT-built

Development Test Environment (DTE)

facility in southeast Michigan, the larg-

est single deployment of dedicated short-

range communication (DSRC) systems in

the country (DSRC is the bandwidth that

allows V2V and V2I communications to

work; the U.S. Federal Communications

Commission has allocated 75 MHz of

spectrum in the 5.9-GHz band for such

vehicle communications).

Michigan’s DOT has also tested 10 key con-

nected vehicle technologies and applica-

tions. An overall traffic management center

(TMC) sends congestion levels and other

information to vehicles. Vehicles then send

road updates back to the TMC. To com-

municate other vehicle-related circum-

stances to the driver, cars were equipped

with emergency vehicle pre-emption, inci-

dent beacons, merge warning systems and

an emergency vehicle warning. Emergency

vehicle pre-emption allows the driver to

press a button that makes the vehicle pass

through a green light at an intersection.


Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication showing types of V2I messages that can be delivered to a vehicle.



Schagrin says cars can use technologies

like this to avoid “T-bone” crashes where

one car driving straight slams directly into

the side of another trying to cross; these

particular crashes cause a lot of damage

and are frequently fatal. Incident beacons

allow a disabled vehicle to broadcast its

distress signal to oncoming vehicles that

can then update the TMC. An emergency

vehicle warning emits a similar signal for

emergency vehicles like fire trucks and

ambulances.

Other test bed applications dealt with V2I

communications. Signal change count-

down allows a driver to watch a count-

down showing when the light will turn

green. A parking availability application

lets the driver access information about

nearby parking spaces and purchase one

of those spots. Also, as an alternative to the

fuel use tax, which is based on calculations

of the total number of miles a vehicle trav-

els, these smart cars had a mileage-based

user fee built in. Once these vehicles enter

a highway, a real-time in-vehicle display

called congestion-based pricing shows fee

and travel information. And for larger ve-

hicles, a bridge height warning mechanism

would give drivers of over-height vehicles

an advance warning.

Industry is also part of the work. The DOT

works with a group called CAMP, or Crash

Avoidance Metrics Partnership, which in-

cludes Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Nissan,

Hyundai-Kia, Volkswagen and Mercedes-

Benz.

Ford, which built the systems demon-

strated in Washington in January, says it

is “rapidly expanding its commitment to

intelligent vehicles that wirelessly talk to

each other, warning of potential dangers

to enhance safety and flag impending traf-

fic congestion to help improve the envi-

ronment.”

DOT plans a series of six driver clinics

around the country starting this summer

with all of these companies to give con-

sumers an opportunity to experience these

safety applications first hand.

The U.S. DOT is also looking for addi-

tional partners, including possibly ones

not traditionally affiliated with the auto-

motive industry. In a new challenge, the

Connected Vehicle Technology Challenge,

DOT invites respondents to answer this

question: When vehicles talk to each other,

what should they say?

The agency wants “short descriptions of

novel, implementable ideas for products

or approaches that utilize DSRC to offer

Wireless connectivity allows cars to be continuously aware of each other so if one car brakes suddenly cars several yards behind the vehicle get a safety warning before they get too close.

DOT plans a series of six

driver clinics around the

country starting this summer

with all of these companies

to give consumers an

opportunity to experience

these safety applications

first hand.


benefits to travelers or society at large.”

The six best submissions will win their

authors a trip to the 2011 Intelligent

Transportation Systems World Congress in

Orlando, Fla., this fall, where they will have

a chance to pitch their ideas to transporta-

tion experts, business professionals — and

potential investors.

ChallengestoovercomeAlthough DOT’s Schagrin sees no big

technological hurdles to V2V and V2I

technology, getting widespread adoption

and having a safe, secure and sensible op-

erating environment on the roads is a dif-

ferent story.

The missing link in many of these innova-

tions isn’t technology. Without legislative

and societal support, the potential pen-

etration levels Schagrin sees for V2V and

V2I innovations may stall.

“There are a lot of policy issues that need

to be addressed,” Schagrin admits. “There’s

privacy concerns, there’s liability concerns,

there’s governance of the overall structure

— who can provide an application, who

Connected vehicles can serve warnings of upcoming intersections.

can operate on the system, what happens

when you operate inappropriately on the

system — that all falls into the governance

structure.”

Although bandwidth for the system isn’t

a concern because of the DSRC spectrum

allocation, privacy is. What if your car says

something about you that you don’t like

while it’s doing all that talking?

The DOT is trying to alleviate cyber-se-

curity concerns by establishing a security

system where vehicles that send and receive

information with other vehicles or devices

have to first establish trust with each other

through a public key infrastructure (PKI)

security system. Schagrin admits this pres-

ents a catch-22 situation for engineers and

regulators alike.

“The greater the privacy, the less secure

the system might be,” Schagrin says. “Or

take it the other way; the more security

you want in the system, the less privacy

you might have.”

However, DOT says that any system for

connected vehicles would be anonymous

and would not allow for individual track-

ing.

Schagrin would not comment on the

current state of funding for V2V or V2I

programs as it appears in the current U.S.

federal budget. Congress was still wres-

tling with continuing resolutions to keep

the government functioning as spring

arrived, but still hasn’t finished a longer-

term agreement on a federal budget for

fiscal year 2011.

Although DOT’s Schagrin

sees no big technological

hurdles to V2V and V2I

technology, getting wide-

spread adoption and having

a safe, secure and sensible

operating environment on

the roads is a different story.


FORMOREINFORMATION:


DecisionpointUltimately, Schagrin says the Department

of Transportation has set a decision point

of 2013 to determine the next steps for

V2V technology for light vehicles (a deci-

sion point for heavy trucks comes a year

later, in 2014). To prepare for this decision,

DOT will be deploying approximately

3000 vehicles in a real world model de-

ployment as part of their research and de-

velopment. It expects this model deploy-

ment to be structured in such a way as to

create a highly concentrated environment

of vehicles talking with each other.

This pilot program allows officials to get

real-world data on vehicle safety and user

acceptance. Researchers will gather user

acceptance data by having real drivers,

not other researchers, driving the smart

vehicles on real roads over a several month

time period. DOT will also set up driver

clinics later this year to allow additional

drivers to experience these safety appli-

cations in a controlled environment to

see how they work. Safety is still key:

DOT says that for both the model deploy-

ment and driver clinics, its number one

priority is driver safety. It plans to have

sufficient safeguards in place to ensure it

does not jeopardize the safety of individu-

als participating in the research.

“The decision point could either be

that we find out we need to do more re-

search, or we could decide to do NCAP,

which is the New Car Assessment Pro-

gram [also known as Stars on Cars], and

that’s a voluntary program in which we

would provide consumer information and

car companies would voluntarily decide

whether they want to include safety ap-

plications in technology or not,” Schagrin

says. There could also be a regulation to

mandate the technology and applications.

While 2013 may seem right around the

corner, for Schagrin this deadline is a long

time coming. When the Department of

Transportation first started researching

intelligent transportation technologies,

he says the technology was very different

from its current state and despite all the

research, there was not much support for

an initiative that seemed “too far ahead of

its time.” Schagrin says he is confident in

V2V and V2I communication isn’t just for cars; trucks, buses and trains can get in on the conversation too.

the positive feedback he has received on

the new program thus far, and how it’s

going to play in to this fast-approaching

milestone.

“Over the past couple of years when the

economy has taken a downturn and the

car companies have been in trouble fi-

nancially — and this is a statement about

how committed everybody is — we saw no

drop-off in support for the safety research

at all,” Schagrin says.

“There was a full commitment through-

out everything, so that’s reassuring and

we’re all in this together. It’s not some-

thing the government can do by itself, it’s

not something that the car companies can

do by themselves; it’s a collaboration. And

we have maintained that collaborative en-

vironment over several years.” n

Stephanie Levy is the associate editor ofMission Critical.

http://connectedvehicle.challenge.gov/

http://www.thefordstory.com/

http://www.its.dot.gov/

http://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0,1607,7-151-9621_11041_38217---,00.html


Implementing intelligent transportation

makes lots of financial sense, particularly

in fast-growing cities around the world,

according to recent studies. What does it

mean for jobs, and what kind of jobs could

it create?

The time spent wasted in traffic around

the world is staggering, and it’s not going

to ease; a United Nations report says that

by 2050, about 70 percent of the world’s

population will live in cities. Those peo-

ple will want some way to move around,

whether that be cars, trucks, buses, rail,

bicycles, Segways or something else.

In the short term, much of the effort

directed at creating intelligent vehicle

systems is aimed at making the current

infrastructure work more efficiently. For

instance, the U.S. Department of Trans-

portation’s Research and Innovative Tech-

nology Administration (RITA) tracks the

benefit of intelligent systems in a monthly

report posted on its website.

One recent report cited the effect of an

“intelligent speed control” system in Los

Angeles that provided drivers with real-

time speed recommendations in con-

gested areas based on travel time data and

weather information. Rather than rushing

into a traffic jam, drivers could instead

travel at a more steady pace that would

reduce congestion all around. In the end,

the study found that such a system cut

fuel consumption by 10 to 20 percent and

lowered carbon dioxide emissions without

drastically increasing time spent on the

freeway.

As cities around the world implement

smart transportation systems, setting up

systems such

as this is one

way that jobs can

be generated. Taking

a tack from NASA in the

days of the space race, the

U.S. DOT has a program aimed

at keeping kids interested in sci-

ence and math as a way of developing a

future career in transportation.

The Garrett A. Morgan program,

named after the inventor of a safer

traffic signal, touts the high-tech jobs

that intelligent transportation systems can

provide, and urges children to become

aerospace engineers, environmentalists,

systems engineers, computer scientists

and communications engineers. “We want

you to help us build the transportation

systems of the future, and we want to help

you develop the technology skills needed

for tomorrow’s transportation jobs,” the

DOT’s ITS website says.

DisruptivetechAs intelligent transportation technology

becomes more “disruptive,” more changes

to existing jobs are likely. Just as the rise of

the automobile itself disrupted horse-base

transportation — including the oft-men-

tioned demise of the buggywhip indus-

try — intelligent transportation promises

much the same thing to the existing trans-

portation sector.

“In general, whenever there’s a major new

technology which you call disruptive or

transformational technology, and old

co m p a n i e s

and industries

get driven out of

the market or reduced

in their significance rela-

tive to the new technology

over time, there’s always going to

be some loss of jobs in the old sec-

tor,” says Bob Finkelstein, president of

Robotic Technology Inc. (for more on

him, see the End Users on Page 47).

Specifically, Finkelstein sees job loss in

industries such as trucking, cab driv-

ing and delivery services. For example,

the American Trucking Associations says

it has more than 37,000 members in the

United States. Finkelstein says future

smart cars would eliminate many of those

jobs because they would be able to provide

the same services with greater efficiency

and less cost.

“It’s easy to see there’s going to be a loss

of jobs in the area where people drive

for a living,” Finkelstein says. “You won’t

have drivers but you’ll have other sorts of

personnel in those businesses and indus-

tries.”

Military officials often say that unmanned

systems are anything but unmanned —

each system requires tens or hundreds of

support personnel to review data, work

the sensors, etc. That’s much the same in

the transportation world. The U.S. DOT

estimates that intelligent transportation

systems in the United States will create

600,000 new jobs over the next two de-

cades.

Whatdoesintelligenttransportationmeanfortheworkforceofthefuture?

Future Jobs


FutureJobs— continued from page 31

SmartsystemsneedsmartpeopleOne of the immediate needs of the intel-

ligent transportation industry is filling

the technology gap. Finkelstein calls these

potential positions “new jobs in the new

technology sector.”

“The new sectors of employment would

include jobs involved with creating intel-

ligent software and associated hardware

for these systems,” Finkelstein said. “That

is, advance sensors and sensor processing

and machine intelligence-related software

and communications, systems for com-

munication between vehicles, between the

infrastructure in vehicles, etc.”

Major automotive industries, university

TurnandfacethestrainFinkelstein sees many changes on the horizon for the auto-motive industry. Here are some ways future jobs may stack up, he says.

n New entrants into the automotive industry As vehicles get smaller and more sophisticated, more

companies might build them.

n New entrants into transportation-related services Changes to vehicles might bring changes to infrastruc-

ture, creating new opportunities in industries like con-struction.

n New major original equipment manufacturers Components such as sensors and software may become

as critical as engines and tires.

NewbusinessmodelsThere are likely to be some new tweaks to existing busi-ness models. In their book, “Reinventing the Automobile,” published by MIT, authors William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns note that networked cars can use advanced Internet searches to help plan out-ings such as trips to a grocery store.

labs and other outside businesses like

Google have already entered the research

and development phase with autonomous

vehicles.

“The main need for furthering the tech-

nology is in the software arena,” Finkel-

stein says. “The sensors can be improved.

I think the available sensor technology

is sufficient if appropriate software were

available to achieve the hard levels of per-

ception and situational awareness, to be at

least as good as that of human drivers or

better.”

Beyond the market for software engi-

neers, there will be business technology

enterprises that help cater smart cars to

“If you want to go to a supermarket, your vehicle’s navi-gation system should show you the supermarkets that are accessible within a specified time or at a specified cost, and will be open when you get there. Furthermore, you can sometimes avoid a trip if opening times, availability of stock, best local prices and so on are known ahead of time.”

This, of course, opens the possibility of advertisements that would appear alongside these results.

“The combination of sophisticated road and parking space markets with urban search and location-based advertising opens up the possibility of some interesting new business models for personal urban mobility,” they write. “Currently, the responsibility for identifying destinations and paying for travel to them rests primarily with drivers. In the future, ad-vertisers might take over much more of that responsibility.”

In the end, Finkelstein says it’s difficult to decisively say where all these new jobs might originate or how many may arise in this new industry.

”It’s hard to determine the ultimate impacts of the new tech-nology on the industry and on society in general,” Finkel-stein says.

the consumer market. For example, Fin-

kelstein believes that smart cars will make

it unnecessary for most people to own

their own vehicles. As a result, services

that allow drivers to summon driverless

or driver-optional cars via cell phone or a

predetermined schedule may evolve, and

they will need employees to staff these new

companies.

“The enterprises dealing with mainte-

nance and retrofitting of these vehicles

will involve all sorts of jobs,” Finkelstein

says. “[Also,] transporting jobs across the

country with these sorts of vehicles with

convoying, there will be different kinds of

trucking and transport.” n


Roadtrainspotting

BYMAGNUSBENNETTDriving in often-clogged European traf-

fic may get easier in the near future,

as drivers may be able to relax and let

someone else take the wheel for a while

without ever getting off the road.

European researchers say they have suc-

cessfully tested technology that they hope

will pave the way for vehicles that can drive

themselves in “road trains” on European

freeways within a decade.

The European Union-financed Safe Road

Trains for the Environment (Sartre) proj-

ect carried out the first successful dem-

onstration of its autonomous vehicle

“platooning” technology in wintry condi-

tions at the Volvo proving ground, close to

Gothenburg, Sweden, in December.

During the demonstration, a lead truck

guided a Volvo S60 around the country

Hellisdrivingwithotherpeople.AtechnologyconsortiuminEuropeistryingtochangethatwithitsSARTREprogram.

road test track without any input from

the car’s driver. The lead vehicle wireless-

ly controlled the Volvo’s speed, distance

and steering. This was the first time the

Sartre development teams had tested

their systems together in the real world —

previous testing had been done on simula-

tors.

GettingSartreontheroadSartre, whose goal is in part to help tackle

Europe’s heavily congested road networks,

is being funded by the European Com-

mission, which is contributing 3.8 mil-

lion euros (US $5.2 million) toward the

total budget of 6.4 million euros (US $8.8

million).

The project is being led by British engineer-

ing consultants Ricardo UK in collabora-

tion with Idiada and Robotiker-Tecnalia of

Sartre’s first road train: A Volvo follows a lead truck outside Göteborg,Sweden, December 2010. All images courtesy Volvo Car Corp.

Reading and drinking

coffee while driving? Not

a problem as long as some

other vehicle is driving.

Spain, Institut for Kraftfahrwesen Aachen

(IKA) of Germany, SP Technical Research

Institute of Sweden, Volvo Car Corpora-

tion and Volvo Technology of Sweden.

In the first demonstration since the start

of the three-year project in 2009, the

lead vehicle — a Volvo automated safety


Sartre— continued from page 33

truck — was fitted with a mouthful of

acronyms in the form of a range of safety

systems including ESP (Electronic Stabil-

ity Program), LKS (Lane Keeping Sup-

port), DAS (Driver Alert Support), LCS

(Lane Change Support) and ACC (Adap-

tive Cruise Control).

Tom Robinson, project director of intel-

ligent transport systems for Ricardo, de-

scribes the first demonstrations as a “ma-

jor milestone” for the European research

program, adding that Sartre is “making

tangible progress towards the realization

of safe and effective road train technol-

ogy.”

He tells Mission Critical that the demon-

stration focused on testing the control and

sensor system, while also assessing the first

iteration of the HMI (human-machine

interface).

“Issues such as longitudinal and lateral

string stability have been assessed with

the two vehicles,” he says. “Vehicles were

driven up to 40 kilometers per hour

[26.8 miles per hour] with a gap size of

10 meters [10.9 yards].

“Both a ‘join’ and ‘leave’ maneuver were

also tested,” he says. “The testing was suc-

cessful, and we gathered sufficient infor-

mation to enable further development to

continue.”

Erik Coelingh, engineering specialist at

Volvo Cars, said his company is pleased to

see the various systems work so well to-

gether the first time.

“After all, the systems come from seven

Sartre member companies in four coun-

The EU project Sartre is testing a technology for vehicles that can drive themselves in long road trains on motorways. This technology has the potential to im-prove traffic flow and journey times, offer greater comfort to drivers, reduce accidents, and improve fuel consumption and hence lower CO2 emissions.


tries,” he says. “The winter weather pro-

vided some extra testing of cameras and

communication equipment.”

SecuringsafetysystemsSome of the safety systems used in the

demonstration were developed by various

E.U.-financed research projects, such as

Have-it and Intersafe-2.

Project leaders at Have-it (Highly auto-

mated vehicles for intelligent transport)

will be demonstrating their “radically new

approach” to highly automated driving in

Sweden in June.

The 27.7 million euro (US $37.85 mil-

lion) project, which is being coordinated

by Siemens VDO Automotive of Germany

in cooperation with academics and com-

panies from seven European countries,

has developed a step-by-step-approach

to transferring driving tasks back from

an automated system to the driver instead

of just switching off an ADAS (Advanced

Driver Assistance System) in the event of

an impending critical situation.

Meanwhile, the 6.5 million euro (US $8.9

million) Intersafe-2 project, coordinated

by Ibeo Automobile Sensor of Germany,

has been developing a Cooperative Inter-

section Safety System (CISS), which re-

searchers say will be able to significantly

reduce injury and fatal accidents at inter-

sections by using advanced onboard sen-

sors for object recognition and relative

localization.

HoponthetrainSartre has set itself a wide set of goals

for its autonomous driving project — to

improve traffic flows and journey times,

offer greater comfort to drivers, reduce

accidents and lower CO2 emissions by im-

proving fuel consumption.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Vehicles

are outfitted with a navigation system and

a transmitter/receiver unit. Drivers who

want to join up with a road train state

their destination and the navigation sys-

tem directs them to the nearest road train.

The car joins the rear of the train and the

lead vehicle takes control of the car, allow-

ing the car’s driver to read, sleep, relax, do

anything but worry about driving.

The lead vehicle would be able to take

control over the acceleration, braking and

steering of between six and eight vehicles

behind it via a platoon sensor envelope

that collates information. That informa-

tion would be presented to the lead vehicle

so it can understand what is happening

around all the vehicles.

Project leaders say the lead vehicle, which

could be a taxi, a bus or a truck, would be

driven by an experienced driver who is

thoroughly familiar with the route.

When it’s time to peel off from the road

train, the car’s driver regains control and

continues on his or her way by exiting off

to the side. The other vehicles in the road

train would close the gap and continue on

their way until the convoy splits up.

The project is mainly aimed at commut-

ers facing long journeys, allowing them

to read a newspaper, use a laptop or even

watch TV when driving to or from work.

As the autonomous system is being built

into the platooning vehicles themselves,

Reading and drinking coffee while driving? Not a problem as long as some other vehicle is driving. In a road train the cars are driving autonomously behind the truck. This technology could free time for the driver, improve safety and decrease the environmental load.

Sartre has set itself a wide

set of goals for its autono-

mous driving project — to

improve traffic flows and

journey times, offer greater

comfort to drivers, reduce

accidents and lower CO2

emissions by improving fuel

consumption.



researchers say there will be no need to

extend the infrastructure along existing

road networks.

That, they argue, will prove a cheaper

option, because a system that involved

wiring up road networks with sensors

to help control the road trains would be

prohibitively expensive.

The Volvo Truck Corp. tells Mission Criti-

cal that safety is “a key issue.

“With the lead vehicle driven by a profes-

sional driver using a truck equipped with

cutting-edge safety features to support the

driver, we secure high safety for the entire

road train,” Volvo spokeswoman Jenny

Bjorsne says. “In addition — in the future

vision of road trains — the professional

driver of a lead vehicle will most likely

have additional training to ensure they

understand particular issues with road

trains.”

But the project partners accept there are

still significant safety and legislative hur-

dles to overcome — as well as public per-

ception issues — as they move forward.

Speaking ahead of the Swedish demon-

stration, Robinson tells Mission Critical, “A

particular example of acceptability is the

inter-vehicle gap size, which the initial re-

sults indicate is larger than we would want

to implement. As people become familiar

and more confident with the system, then

they will accept a smaller gap size.” In

other words, no tailgating until people get

used to it.

Robinson also points out that legal issues

will have to be taken into account. If pla-

tooning takes hold, things that are now

illegal, such as texting while driving, will

someday be encouraged.

“A serious consideration of the project

is legislation and how this may affect the

uptake of Sartre platooning,” he says. “The

program has an aim to allow following

vehicle drivers to undertake other activi-

ties such as operate a phone or laptop, and

these at present would be considered ille-

gal. The program is investigating the leg-

islative issues, will consider these in the

design and will also be discussing these

with relevant government stakeholders.”

AworldwithroadtrainsIn the meantime, Sartre’s partners are

stressing the benefits of the platooning

concept, which they say could be “signifi-

cant.”


They estimate that, compared with cars

being driven individually, the fuel con-

sumption saving for high-speed operation

of road trains will be in the region of 20

percent, depending on vehicle spacing and

geometry. Their argument is that as vehi-

cles in a train would be close to each other,

they would be able to exploit the resultant

lower air drag.

They also argue that accidents caused by

driver action and driver fatigue will be

reduced, and better use of road capacity

means that journey times can be reduced.

On its website, the Sartre project further

claims that for users of the technology,

“the practical attractions of a smoother,

more predictable and lower-cost journey

which offers the opportunity of additional

free time will be considerable.”

But the question remains what will hap-

pen after the end of this three-year project,

which is due to wind up in 2012. Ricardo

has pointed out that the concept is unlikely

to lead to a sudden switch to autonomous

driving on Europe’s freeways.

“Technically Sartre platooning could be

ready for rollout in 10 years,” Robinson

says. “Given the potential legislative is-

sues, it is more likely that incremental or

interim solutions — using knowledge and

technology from Sartre — will be offered,

such as platooning in dedicated lanes.”

But some observers in the United King-

dom remain to be convinced by the prac-

ticality of the project.

“To be quite honest, I am very skeptical

as to whether it is of practical relevance,”

road transport expert professor Colin

Bamford of Huddersfield University in

England tells Mission Critical. “The sheer

volume of traffic on all U.K. motorways

and elsewhere, is that I really cannot see

it working.

“A major consideration in the U.K. is that

the mass transit alternatives are not attrac-

tive for most road users,” he continued.

“There could be more potential for freight

services, where say one lane on a motor-

way is designated for freight only vehicles.

Even then I remain very dubious.”

Others said they will watch how the Sartre

project unfolds before reaching a conclu-

sion.

Truck haulage companies say the concept

is not entirely new, but they have no objec-

tion to the concept in principle.

As a car in the road train reaches the junction at which it needs to leave the highway, its driver retakes control and moves away from the convoy, which then closes the space vacated. Everyone else can continue eating, drinking, reading or talking on the phone.



“Mercedes-Benz proposed something

similar more than a decade ago for 40-ton

trucks and, as I recall, the regulatory ob-

stacles were considered to be quite as chal-

lenging as the technical issues,” says Jack

Semple, director of policy for the U.K.’s

Road Haulage Association (RHA). “At that

stage, there was no European Commis-

sion backing that I am aware of. This lat-

est project is led by companies, including

Volvo and Ricardo, which also have global

reach and reputation.

“The RHA would be interested to learn

more in due course,” he continues. “There

may be a range of traffic management op-

tions, and the fuel savings proposed are

clearly attractive. In 10 years’ time, they

may be all the more so.”

He adds, “Road safety would be one of

several concerns, but I can think of little

reason, in principle, for the RHA to op-

pose such technology, assuming it can be

shown to be reliable and introduced in a

way that haulers had access to it regardless

of company/fleet size.”

Road safety campaigners say they would

like to see a full evaluation of the safety as-

pects of the system.

Ellen Booth, campaigns officer for U.K.

road safety charity Brake, says, “As with all

new road technology, safety must be ab-

solutely paramount. This technology is in

its infancy, so we have yet to see what the

potential pitfalls could be.” Brake would

like to see a full-scale evaluation of the

safety impact of such a system in compa-

rable conditions to those it would face on

the road.

“Although human factors are undoubtedly

important in crashes, there may be other

risks associated with joining or exiting a

platoon, with technology failure or with

the magnification of any risks associated

with the driver heading up the platoon,”

she adds.

The project leaders say Sartre-developed

technology could “most likely” go into

production in a few years’ time. But, as

they readily accept, it could take substan-

tially longer to win public acceptance and

secure legislation, because 25 European

governments would be required to pass

similar laws for the concept to become a

reality.

In the meantime, the Sartre road train

rolls on.

The project leaders plan further tests

throughout 2011, introducing new chal-

lenges such as faster speeds, shorter inter-

vehicle distances and more vehicles.

The demonstrations will also feature more

complex platoon strategies, including

handling a platoon that is approaching a

slower vehicle.

“These tests are likely to be carried out to

different degrees at test tracks in Goth-

enburg and the U.K.,” says Volvo’s Jenny

Bjorsne. “In 2012 we will be starting as-

sessment, where we are seeking to assess

the actual benefits to platoon users. These

will be carried out by [private test circuit

owners] Idiada on a test track in Spain and

hopefully will include a demonstration of

the system operating on a public highway

in Spain.

“The project will continue evaluation of

technologies and identify problems to

solve,” she says. “In fact, a big part of the

project is to find and identify disadvan-

tages. One of them might be that very long

road trains can block exits to slipways for

other vehicles, and we recognize this and

are seeking to identify an appropriate

length of platoon.” n

Magnus Bennett is a journalist currently workingwiththeBBCintheUnitedkingdom.

Erik Coelingh, Volvo Cars, project leader for Sartre road train project.

The project leaders say

Sartre-developed technology

could “most likely” go into

production in a few years’

time. But … it could take

substantially longer to win

public acceptance…


Pop Culture Corner

kITT,keepyourscannerspeeled!Of all Hollywood’s driverless car concepts,

none was more tricked out than KITT,

the car with a mind of its own on the

1980s series “Knight Rider,” starring David

Hasselhoff, who tired of having to wear

so many clothes and went on to star in

“Baywatch.”

In real life a $100,000 souped-up Pontiac

TransAm, KITT — or Knight Industries

Two Thousand — could interact with

humans with technologies like a voice

synthesizer to speak, an anamorphic equal-

izer that used fiber optics to let it see and

even sensors that allowed the car to smell

its environment.

KITT was controlled by an artificial intel-

ligence system, Alpha Circuit, that acted

as a communication link between the

car’s CPU and controls. Microscanners let

KITT detect what was around it — essen-

tially an all-directions lidar. The thing was

even equipped with flame throwers. One

technology on KITT that likely will never

make it to the streets — its onboard fax

machine.

NBC tried again with “Knight Rider” in

2008, with KITT voiced by Val Kilmer,

but the TV show was short-lived.

The only non-German car the country is jealous of — David Hasselhoff with KITT from a “Knight Rider” screenshot.

Engineers aren’t always behind new technologies we see. Hollywood generates plenty of new gadgets and ideas on its own, some of which eventually work their way into the hands of the public.

While not all good ideas, here are some of the concepts from the big and small screen of how life will look with intelligent vehicles.

‘MinorityReport’“Minority Report’s” vision of 2054 Wash-

ington, D.C., is truly a thing of science fic-

tion: no traffic.

No accidents either — in the future,

according to this Steven Spielberg film

based on a Philip K. Dick short story, cars,

called Meg-Levs, will run on a magnetic

three-axis grid. Suspended in place by

magnets, the cars are able to drive in urban

areas at speeds up to 100 mph on roads

and up and down the sides of buildings.

The cars and pods

featured in the

film were the

work of Harald

Belker, creator of

the 1997 version of the Bat-

mobile, who was tasked

by Spielberg to make

a series of futuristic

Lexus car and per-

sonal transit pod

concepts.

“A lot of thought went into the Mag-Lev

vehicle, and we were designing the whole

system parallel with it,” Belker said in an

interview with Car Design News. “The goal

was to design an individual mass-trans-

portation system using a custom capsule

that would transport you anywhere within

the system.”

Belker isn’t only a movie car concept mak-

er. He previously worked at Mercedes-

Benz on its Smart car project, now in pro-

duction.


PopCultureCorner— continued from page 39

Carswithmindsoftheirown?Thehorror!Not every depiction of autonomous

vehicles is in an awesome futuristic world.

Many portrayals are of creepy, spooky

or outright horrifying automobiles that

torment their owners.

Stephen King has actually written two

novels about terror-reigning cars. In his

1983 novel “Christine,” a 1958 Plymouth

Fury with a history of being at the scene

of horrific crimes and incidents comes

under a new owner, who then starts expe-

riencing his own slew of terrors. Christine

eventually drives herself around town,

committing murders and repairing herself

so her owner doesn’t suspect a thing.

In 2002, King revisited the topic in

“From a Buick 8,” about a mysterious car

that can heal itself and possibly serves as

The cus-

tomized

1971 Lin-

coln Con-

t i n e n t a l

Mark III,

designed

by origi-

nal Bat-

m o b i l e r

George Baris,is just flat-out

murderous, hunting down

people in a desert town. The

film has an 18 percent rating

on Rotten Tomatoes.

The 1974 TV movie “Killdoz-

er” featured a bulldozer that

develops a mind of its own.

Like King’s nightmares on

wheels, Killdozer isn’t autonomous due to

technology. In this case, the vehicle is pos-

sessed by an alien entity. The movie was

based on a story by legendary writer Theo-

dore Sturgeon, who probably left it off his

resume. n

an entrance between

worlds.

In an episode of

“The Twilight Zone”

called “You Drive,”

a man is involved in

a hit-and-run acci-

dent. After fleeing the

scene, he learns the

boy has died. After the in-

cident, his vehicle takes on

a mind of its own, driving

him to the location of the

accident when he doesn’t

intend to head there. On

a rainy night, the car runs

down the man, who has

taken to walking every-

where. Before it hits him,

it slows and opens the door. The

man, riddled with guilt, drives to the

police station and confesses to the mur-

der.

In 1977 film “The Car,” James Brolin

possesses a car with supernatural powers.

Herbie,fullyhumanBoth a TV show and a seemingly end-

less series of movies from Disney, Herbie

is still so popular that there are meet-up

groups for Volkswagen Beetle owners that

have designed their car to look just like the

original.

The anthropomorphic vehicle has been

seen onscreen since the late 1960s with

everyone from Buddy Hackett to Lindsay

Lohan.

Originally portrayed in “Herbie the Love

Bug,” Herbie’s owner — a racecar driver

with a failing career — realizes the car has

a mind of its own and a need for speed.

While not as technologically thought-

out as KITT, Herbie was distinct for it’s

human characteristics — producers say

they picked the Beetle because it was the

only car they wanted to pet. The high-

est grossing film of 1969, Herbie’s lifelike

quality earned it the first ever car credit in

=a film.

The latest incarnation, “Herbie: Fully

Loaded” grossed more than $144 million.


technology Gap

In a sense, a move to intelligent transpor-

tation is a return to the horse.

“The Westerns that showed the cowboy

calling to his horse to pick him up, and

then falling onto it and being taken where

he needed to go even while asleep in the

saddle, present a powerful idea that was

lost when the automobile took over,” au-

thors William J. Mitchell, Christopher

E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns

write in their 2010 book, “Reinventing the

Automobile.”

Much of the work being done to realize an

intelligent transportation system is aimed

at regaining that capability — we’d have

vehicles we can talk to and that can com-

municate with each other and which can

perform some tasks autonomously. And

they probably won’t smell quite as much.

But what still needs to be done to accom-

plish this? While much of the technology

is present in some form, it needs to be bet-

ter, cheaper and applied in some standard-

ized way.

Power systems: Critical, obviously. Au-

thors Mitchell, Borroni-Bird and Burns

say electric-drive vehicles are required to

make this whole idea work. They call for

remaking “automotive DNA,” starting

with vehicles powered by batteries or fuel

cells. “With this new DNA, our vehicles

will be electric drive, fueled by electricity

and hydrogen, electronically controlled,

and will function as nodes in a connected

transportation network,” they write.

Needed are better batteries, or, more likely,

fuel cells. “Only the hydrogen fuel cell op-

tion promises to combine the range and

refueling-time convenience of conven-

tional family-sized vehicles with the en-

ergy and environmental benefits of pure

battery-powered vehicles,” they write.

Sensors: They’re pretty good but not very

affordable.

The U.S. Army’s Convoy Active Safety

Technology (CAST) program has created

bolt-on kits that can allow vehicles to fol-

low a leader vehicle, brake in synchronic-

ity and detect and avoid obstacles, but they

cost around $30,000 per vehicle and “even

that’s too expensive,” James Overholt, di-

rector of the Joint Center for Robotics at

U.S. Army Research and Development

Command (RDECOM)-Tank Automotive

Research Development and Engineering

Center (TARDEC), tells Mission Critical.

“But I can say with a good deal of confi-

Back to the future? Horses were the original intelligent transportation systems. Future cars and trucks may be more like them.

NotaseasyasitsoundsBacktothehorse?


TechnologyGap— continued from page 41

dence that we’re pretty good at operating

in benign environments without a lot of

people around on unstructured roadways.

We can do that.” Adding in moving people

and objects gets more difficult. However,

the private sector is doing some amazing

things with sensors these days, he says.

Greg Kruger, intelligent transportation

systems manager for the state of Michigan

Department of Transportation, agrees on

the cost issue for hardware. “This cannot

be expensive,” he said at a 2009 gathering

of intelligent vehicle experts. “This cannot

significantly affect the cost of a vehicle.”

Mercedes-Benz tech officials Luca Delgros-

si and Christina Coplen also site sensors as

a key area. “You can do a lot with sensors.

… The art of it really is getting down to a

sensor fusion and a software set that can

fit on a very small package that you can

put into multiple vehicles,” Coplen said

at the AUVSI Great Lakes Chapter’s 2010

Autonomous Drive, Connected Vehicle

and Robotics Workshop.

Networkstandards: Vehicles that can talk

aren’t much good if they can’t commu-

nicate with each other regardless of what

company built them. The U.S. Department

of Transportation is working with a variety

of industry partners on vehicle-to-vehicle

(V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)

communications, which must function for

both a sleek new car and an old but retro-

fitted truck. “Interoperability is critical to

the effectiveness of V2V safety systems,”

the DOT says.

It can’t just be the signals, either. The “Re-

inventing the Automobile” authors note

that interoperability standards are also re-

quired for “connection to charging infra-

structure and electric grids and hardware

interfaces among crucial components and

subsystems.” Plug and play: not just for

your computer anymore.

Publicdesire: You can lead people to a bet-

ter horse, but you can’t make them ride.

Michigan DOT’s Kruger says public aware-

ness will be one key enabler for intelligent

transportation. Good design — actually

having cool new cars — is one way to get

there, say the “Reinventing the Automo-

bile” authors. “To succeed on a large scale,

future vehicles must have the look and feel

of a new and desirable kind of product.

Nobody thinks of an iPod as a shrunken

home stereo system, and nobody should

be left with the impression that an intel-

ligent electric-drive vehicle is a dull but

worthy ‘econobox.’” n

To read “Reinventing the Automobile,” scan this barcode with yoursmartphone.

To see a video of MIT’s proposed City Car, scan this barcode with yoursmartphone.

It will take a lot of work to reach the day when conveyances such as this experimental vehicle, developed by Segway, General Motors and SAIC, frequent the roadways. Photo courtesy Segway.


Uncanny Valley

The commercial starts ominously, with a

car approaching through a tunnel.

“Hands-free driving,” says a deep male

voice. “Cars that park themselves. An auto-

mated car driven by a search-engine com-

pany. We’ve seen that movie. It ends with

robots harvesting our bodies for energy.”

The car speeds up and the announcer

informs us it’s the 2011 Dodge Charger,

“leader of the human resistance.” The

Charger then speeds out of the tunnel

toward presumably non-automated free-

dom. So this vehicle is some kind of tech-

nology-free throwback? Not exactly.

The Charger comes equipped with Ucon-

nect, a screen-based system that controls

all entertainment and vehicle settings. One

option is Sirius satellite radio travel link,

which includes weather, fuel prices, sports

and movie listings along the way “to make

every trip more efficient.” All of that is

controlled by the driver, of course, and so

doesn’t invalidate the car’s seeming fear of

electronics.

But the Charger also comes equipped

with an electronic stability control system,

which detects when a vehicle is starting to

spin and “attempts to correct the vehicle’s

course by automatically controlling the

throttle and applying the brakes on in-

dividual wheels,” according to Dodge. It

does that by working with the car’s anti-

lock brake system, another safety devices

that enhances driver control by taking

some of it away. That system is standard

on all models of the Charger. One option

is the adaptive cruise control, which gives a

warning when another car gets too close.

So the Charger, far from being an elec-

tronics-free stripper model, has many up-

to-date driver-assist features that people

expect of a modern car (though it does not

seem to park itself).

“Americans … love driving their cars; I

don’t think you’ll get away from that, but

I think we’ll be able to provide much safer

cars,” says James Overholt, the director of

the Joint Center for Robotics at U.S. Army

Research and Development Command

(RDECOM)-Tank Automotive Research

Development and Engineering Center

(TARDEC). “The technology is there that

now will take some of the so-to-speak driv-

ing functions out of the hands of the users,

potentially in emergency situations.”

Overholt says safety, and demonstrating

that safety, is key to integrating this tech-

nology into civilian and military vehicles,

but it makes sense economically, too. He

asks a question: What percentage of a gal-

lon of gas goes to moving a 3,000-pound

car carrying a 150-pound human?

“One percent. One percent of a gallon

of gas goes toward actually moving the

human being. Seventy-five percent is lost

in heat, so you’re left with 25 percent and

now you’ve got to distribute that and

when you do the math it comes down

to 1 percent. As engineers, we should be

ashamed of that. Even 2 to 3 percent, the

savings would be enormous,” he says. “If

you can start getting into vehicles that are

intelligent, you can start avoiding acci-

dents; much of the vehicle weight is given

up in providing protection for the soft,

squishy things in the frame … so if you

can start avoiding accidents you can start

taking weight out, and if you can start tak-

ing weight out you can start taking parts

out. So there’s this whole cascading effect

that happens once you start implementing

intelligent technology.”

The two most powerful obstacles to the

greater use of unmanned systems and ro-

botics are “safety and public acceptance,”

says Michael Toscano, president and CEO

of AUVSI.

With cars, however, the world has shown

it is willing to accept risk when the reward

is so obvious. In the years since Henry

Ford introduced the Model T, tens of

thousands have died each year, and now

“there are six million accidents a year, just

in the U.S., and those six million acci-

dents cost us over $230 billion in medical

costs,” Toscano says. If you asked a person

in 1908 — the year the Model T was first

produced — if they would be willing to

accept technology that would revolution-

ize the world and increase human mobility

to an unprecedented scale but along with

it would come tens of thousands of deaths

each year and billions in medical costs, the

answer might well be no.

But because cars proved themselves over

time, the answer now is yes. But it should

have anti-lock brakes and traction control.

And, if it could park itself, that would be

nice. n

Who’s afraid of hands-free driving?

To watch the DodgeCharger commercial, scan this barcode with your smartphone.


timeline

AutomatedSystemsinMercedesBenzMercedes-Benz is one of the few carmakers in the world whose roots extend to the dawn of the automobile era. Its early efforts were very much of the “horseless carriage” variety of transportation, but the world’s oldest automaker has steadily introduced or advanced many of the safety technologies that are bringing us to the era when cars not only move their passengers, they protect them. Here’s a timeline of where Mercedes-Benz — and the rest of the automobile industry — has been regarding safety innovations.

1886: Gottleib Dalmer, one of the founders

of Mercedes-Benz, invents a horseless carriage. That same year, Daimler, Benz and Maybach independently develop

the internal combustion engine.

1894: Carl Benz creates his first production car, the Benz

Velo, which raced in the first recorded Paris-Rouen race.

1924: Mercedes-Benz cars are the first to have brakes on all four

wheels.

1950s: Mercedes-Benz opens U.S. dealerships and forms Mercedes-Benz

USA.

1954: Mercedes Benz introduces the

300SL car to the market. It was the fastest car of its time, and the first car to use gasoline direct injection

for power.

1951: The company introduces the safety

cage concept, which includes “crumple zones” to minimize

harm to passengers in accidents.


All photos courtesy Mercedes-Benz.

1980s: A team from Bundeswehr

University of Munich equips a Mercedes van with sensors to create VaMoRs, a self-driving

robotic van.

1987: Mercedes-Benz introduces its traction control system, which keeps cars from skidding by taking over

some vehicle braking and acceleration control.

1995: A retooled Mercedes-

Benz S-Class car drives from Munich to

Copenhagen and back, at times reaching

109 mph.

2002: Mercedes-Benz launches Pre-SAFE systems in cars. Pre-SAFE detects potential accident scenarios in

advance and triggers preventive measures to the vehicle and driver

for a potential impact.

2005: Mercedes-Benz introduces DISTRONIC PLUS and brake-assist plus technologies to its S-Class vehicles. DISTRONIC PLUS keeps the car a set distance behind the

vehicle in front, applies the brakes as required and can even bring the car to a complete halt, depending on the traffic situation. If the gap to the vehicle in front narrows too quickly, the system gives the driver an audible warning and, as soon as this first warning signal sounds, automatically calculates

the brake pressure required to prevent a collision in this situation.

2006: Mercedes-Benz puts

DISTRONIC PLUS and brake-assist plus in its

CL-Class vehicles.

2008: Mercedes-Benz introduces Attention Assist technology, which detects when drivers become drowsy and alerts

them to take a break.

2010: Mercedes-Benz’s CL-class vehicles include Active Lane-Keeping Assist and Active Blind Spot Assist. These new

innovations are part of the two dozen driver-assist programs that Mercedes-Benz installs in CL-class vehicles.


testing, testing

It wasn’t a university or a traditional ro-

botics company that grabbed the nation-

al spotlight last year for its autonomous

car testing. It was that all-encompassing

Internet giant Google that paved the way,

outfitting a Toyota Prius with autonomous

car technology and taking matters into

its own hands, driving up and down the

California coast to test it.

Google outwardly admitted to what some

autonomous car geeks only whisper to

others when in good company: If you put

a guy behind the wheel of an autonomous

car, you can test away — no permits, no

sectioned off road, no fuss at all.

“Safety has been our first priority in this

project,” says Sebastian Thurn, a software

engineer at Google, on the company’s

blog. “Our cars are never unmanned. We

always have a trained safety driver behind

the wheel who can take over as easily as

one disengages cruise control. And we also

have a trained software operator in the

passenger seat to monitor the software.

“Any test begins by sending out a driver

in a conventionally driven car to map the

route and road conditions,” he continues.

“By mapping features like lane markers

and traffic signs, the software in the car be-

comes familiar with the environment and

its characteristics in advance. And we’ve

briefed local police on our work.”

AdriverlessMountainViewGooglegetsinontheautonomouscaractioninCalifornia

Google drove autonomous Toyota Priuses up and down the California coast, clocking in more than 140,000 miles behind the wheel. Photo courtesy Google.

From the Googleplex in Mountain View,

Calif., to Santa Monica, down San Fran-

cisco’s ski-able Lombard Street, across the

Golden Gate bridge, breezing down the

PCH, day tripping to Lake Tahoe, Google’s

autonomous car joyride reads like a bur-

geoning band’s first West Coast tour

itinerary. More than 140,000 miles later,

Google accomplished what the company

calls a robotics first.

Though it wasn’t a first for their engi-

neers. Google gathered some of the best

and brightest from the DARPA Challenges

and tasked them with the feat. Chris Urm-

son, technical team leader from Carnegie

Mellon in 2007; Mike Montemarlo, soft-

ware lead on the winning 2005 Stanford

Grand Challenge team; and Anthony Le-

vandowski, autonomous motorcycle and

pizza delivery expert, all worked for the

“Don’t be evil” company in securing a

place in autonomous car history.

The goal for Google: cut down on the

1.2 million lives lost in traffic accidents

every year.

“We believe our technology has the

potential to cut that number, perhaps by

as much as half,” says Thurn. “We’re also

confident that self-driving cars will trans-

form car sharing, significantly reducing

car usage, as well as help create the new

‘highway trains of tomorrow.’”

Not to mention the 52 minutes a day spent

commuting, says Thrun, citing a U.S. De-

partment of Transportation stat.

“Imagine being able to spend that time

more productively.”

Fifty-two minutes is, after all, quite a few

cat videos on the company’s YouTube. nThe guts of Google’s car. Photo courtesy Google.


End Users

Robert Finkelstein’s career in unmanned

systems spans more than 40 years and

includes a stint on the board of AUVSI.

But it wasn’t until a conference on robot-

ics in the 1980s that his focus moved from

unmanned systems in military operations

to civilian life.

“I got an epiphany that unmanned ve-

hicles, remotely piloted vehicles, etc. were

robots,” Finkelstein says. “I never thought

of it in that sense before and neither did

most people. They weren’t called robots

typically back then at all.”

Now, as president of Robotic Technology

Inc., he’s taking unmanned systems to the

streets, literally, with the Transportation

Technology Transfer Initiative, or T3I. The

project, co-sponsored by AUVSI, aims to

help introduce driver-optional or driver-

less cars to American roads in the next 10

to 15 years.

“I think by 2020, you should be able to

buy a hands-free or driver-optional car

for general purpose use that will be able

to recognize pedestrians, stop signs, traf-

fic signals and so on in relatively complex

environments,” Finkelstein says.

Much of the technology that will serve

as a gateway to these “smart cars” already

exists. Modern technologies such as GPS,

EZ-Pass and OnStar were in their nascent

developmental stages just 20 years ago.

Specifically, the introduction of automat-

ed cruise control to vehicles started to ease

some of the burden of driving — the driver

only has to focus on steering, while his feet

remain free. According to Finkelstein, this

technology became successful because of

a “demand pull on the technology, not

just a technology push”— the cost to man-

ufacture the technology dropped consid-

erably while the end product continued

to increase driver performance. But the

current technologies on the market repre-

sent just a small part of what car buyers

could potentially enjoy.

“It’s not being heavily advertised by the

automotive manufacturers for a variety for

reasons, and it’s not clear to me what all

these reasons are,” Finkelstein says. “Some

things like the automated parking system

RobertFinkelstein

“I think by 2020, you should be able to buy a hands-

free or driver-optional car for general purpose use

that will be able to recognize pedestrians,

stop signs, traffic signals and so on in relatively

complex environments.”


EndUsers— continued from page 47

available in some cars was advertised here,

but for the most part the technology is rel-

atively under the radar, so to speak.”

The next step in bringing smart cars to

the streets involves a convergence of ideas

between the Department of Defense, the

Department of Transportation and the

automotive industry. The Department

of Defense has already introduced nu-

merous driverless systems to its ground

and air forces. More recently, intelligent

vehicle demonstrations like the DARPA

Grand Challenges in 2004 and 2005 and

the Urban Challenge in 2007 showcased

driverless cars and trucks competing on

cross-country terrain and urban streets,

respectively. In the Urban Challenge, un-

manned vehicles had to account for ob-

stacles in the road, including pedestrians.

The next technological step is improving

the “intelligence” of unmanned systems to

make the safe for roads.

“I would call it perception: the ability for

the robot or intelligent vehicle to perceive,

which involves sensing,” Finkelstein says.

“But beyond sensing, not just seeing ob-

jects and knowing that there is an object,

but understanding the significance of the

object and how the robot or intelligent ve-

hicle is supposed to behave in the presence

of that object.”

Finkelstein says he expects unmanned

systems to obtain this level of human-like

cognizance between 2030 and 2050. In the

meantime, General Motors predicts it will

have driverless cars on the market as early

as 2015, but Finkelstein thinks 2020 is a

more realistic goal. By 2025, Finkelstein says

driverless vehicles will have a substantial

foothold in everyday life through services

such as deliveries and interstate trucking.

Ultimately, Finkelstein believes the emer-

gence of smart cars will “virtually elimi-

nate crashes and death and destruction.”

By decreasing wreckage on roadways,

Finkelstein also predicts smart cars will

increase efficiency in road lanes, meaning

drivers can enjoy a more pleasurable and

productive commute.

“Currently people spend an enormous

amount of time while commuting …

doing texting or phoning or putting on

makeup or reading a book or all kinds of

other things, even semi-sleeping, that are

quite dangerous,” Finkelstein says. “Given

that there aren’t a lot of people who enjoy

commuting, having the ability to do other

things … would create a major demand

for the technology when people realize

these benefits, not to mention the greater

efficiency of the commute.”

From an institutional standpoint, put-

ting more efficient smart cars on the road

could mean that local governments don’t

have to spend as much money on new

road construction and road maintenance.

Furthermore, Finkelstein says tech compa-

nies like Google could use their expertise

in software development to go in to the

automotive industry. The introduction of

smart cars to the road will also force the

automotive industry to phase out driver-

controlled cars. Finkelstein says the two

could not co-exist safely on roads and this

gradual elimination of driver-controlled

cars will probably take place in one gen-

eration. After that, driver-controlled cars

won’t be allowed on highways in the same

sense that horse-drawn carriages aren’t

allowed on highways — they would simply

be too dangerous.

“This will also have an adverse effect ini-

tially on all people who make a living driv-

ing,” Finkelstein admits. “The same thing

with trucks, transportation systems and

the like. If you can have vehicles that don’t

need a human driver, then this creates a

problem for current drivers. The advent

of intelligent vehicles will also, though,

create all kinds of other jobs in develop-

ing newer and better software and censors,

instrumentation for the infrastructure and

so on. There will be many new enterprises,

many new goods and services as a conse-

quence of intelligent vehicle technology.”

As these changes progress, T3I will play a

role in examining the consequences of this

new technology, both positive and nega-

tive, for the civilian and military sectors.

“The benefits of this technology once it’s

achieved and perfected will be very com-

pelling,” Finkelstein says. n

“Given that there aren’t a lot of people who enjoy commuting, having the ability to do other things …

would create a major demand for the technology when people realize

these benefits, not to mention the greater efficiency of the commute.”

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