Road Vehicle Automation 2

Industry, government, and academia are collaborating on various projects to develop automated driving technologies in Japan. Major automobile manufacturers are actively developing automated driving vehicles that incorporate these technologies. Driving demonstrations were conducted at CEATEC Japan in October 2013, and at the ITS World Congress, also in 2013. Some automobile manufacturers have even announced that vehicles equipped with automated driving features will enter the market around the year 2020. In the light of these developments, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism established an Autopilot System Study Group, which organized the issues, studied the policies needed to implement automated driving, and prepared a roadmap between June 2012 and August 2013. On October 8, 2013, the study group, released an Interim Report. In 2014, the Japanese government announced the “Public-Private ITS Initiatives and Roadmap” and established a new Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) that included an Automated Driving Systems project. Based on the schedule established in the roadmap, the government intends to rapidly develop and implement both the road and vehicle aspects of the project with collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Technological systems designed to assist drivers are becoming more common in vehicles today. As these systems become more advanced, vehicles will be able to execute routine driving maneuvers and eventually perform all driving tasks. In September 2012, California passed a law to allow these advanced, or autonomous, vehicles to be tested and operated on its public roadways. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is tasked with developing regulations pursuant to the law. Regulations governing the automobile manufacturers’ testing of these vehicles have been completed, and the salient provisions are discussed in this paper.

Driver assistance systems have been successfully deployed to the market in the last fifteen years resulting in an increase of driving comfort and driving safety. In the future, these systems will be able to analyze ever more complex traffic situations and to support the driver or even act independently. Upcoming functionality will lead to partially automated driving, highly automated functions will follow soon after. With the increase of automation the role of the driver is going to change gradually from an active driver to a passenger at least for some duration of the drive. We discuss the implications of this evolution on the requirements for future vehicle architectures. In particular, we discuss the electric on-board power supply of critical driving components for longitudinal and lateral vehicle guidance and derive system safety and architectural requirements.

For highly and, ultimately, fully automated driving to become a reality and gain broad market acceptance, industry participants must resolve three critical technological problems. The first concerns the car’s ability to localize itself to centimeter-level precision: ‘where exactly am I?’ The second relates to the car’s ability to recognize and react to events occurring on the road beyond the reach of its onboard sensors: ‘what lies ahead?’ And the third concerns the car’s ability to drive in a way that is acceptable to the car’s occupants and other road users: ‘how can I get there comfortably?’ In this paper, the authors outline the work of their organization, HERE, in developing a location cloud for highly automated driving that offers resolutions to each of these problems.

We move away from the engineering based paradigm of Automated Driving and the political target of Full Automation in order to focus on the need to facilitate end-users’ readiness to share driving with the vehicle. Intuitive Driving Automation facilitates the relationship between end-user and vehicle so as to enable a fluid, continuous exchange of agency between the two. Ceding control requires trust, and trust requires adequate and intuitive communication. This communicative, trusting relationship can be achieved by adding reciprocity into the concept of Human Machine Interface and thinking of it as a Human Robot Relationship. The humanizing of technology implicit in this new relationship will be a considerable step towards making Automated Driving possible. (Written in the style of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.)

Full automation is good. But the path toward full automation must traverse the dangerous stages of partial automation, where the very successes of automation may make human drivers less able to respond to the unexpected, unavoidable imperfections of the automation. The appropriate design path to deal with this requires us to reconsider the driver and automation as a team, as collaborative partners.

The success of automated vehicles ultimately hinges on how well they meet their users’ needs. The study and application of human factors throughout the automated-vehicle design cycle can yield a safe, useful, and reliable technology that does what its users want. This paper reports on a breakout session of the 2014 “Automated Vehicles Symposium” aiming to present the state of automated-vehicle human factors research and how it is being applied in the development of automated vehicles. Discussions were framed around two Transportation Research Board (TRB) Research Needs Statements that pertained to Human Factors research on automated vehicles. The two needs statements were officially balloted by TRB and covered: (1) the transfer of control between levels of automation or back to manual driving, and (2) the misuse and abuse of automated vehicles. Additionally, the group primarily considered issues associated with NHTSA’s Level 2 and Level 3 automation. The transfer of control discussions included designing for situation awareness, mental model development, and “failing gracefully.” For automation misuse, the consensus was that some drivers will unknowingly over-rely on the automation in situations that it was not designed to handle. For automation abuse, it was recognized that there will be a segment of the driving population who will knowingly improperly and unsafely use the automation for personal gain. Therefore, any design of Level 2 or Level 3 systems that require the driver to be in the loop or brought back into the loop should include feedback and possibly forcing functions that prevent unsafe vehicle operation. Ultimately, the attendees unanimously agreed that human factors methods should be employed early and iteratively in the design cycle to achieve this goal.

This chapter will review three questions that prompted significant discussion at the 2014 Symposium on Vehicle Automation sponsored by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) as potential accelerators or brakes for deployment of automated vehicles: (1) Where are uniform laws needed? (2) What deployment will come first and will it be evolutionary or revolutionary? (3) How should tests be devised for ratings or certification? Participants in the “Legal Accelerators and Brakes” session noted that the legal environment does not appear to be the obstacle, or “brake” to autonomous vehicle deployment that many fear it will be. Greater uniformity in operational laws, such as tailgating and distracted driving, as well as in safety testing standards, could potentially accelerate deployment. Participants in the session concluded that key privacy and security questions will be informed by legal developments that are not unique to driving.

It is widely acknowledged that deployment of vehicle-highway automation is contingent on market forces technology readiness, but in this chapter we go one step further: what is vehicle-highway automation? One hand, it is described as an evolution of the sensor and perhaps communication technologies available for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) of today. On the other hand, it may be a highly-cooperative system. We therefore qualitatively examine two extreme systems—a free agent or autonomous vehicle and a highly-coordinated or platooning system—in light of six key considerations: (1) influence of operation policies, (2) desirable vehicle following distances, (3) interaction with normal, non-automated traffic, (4) vehicle coordination principles, (5) handling of hazards, and (6) what is expected of the driver (or system supervisor). We pose a series of questions on the practicability or the technology maturity of both these extreme systems. While we note that there may be dogmatic approaches, we instead suggest that these questions be posed as technology maturity litmus cases in system design. We suggest that the systems may initially lie somewhere between the two extreme cases but as (perhaps significant) time progresses, mature to one or both a free agent or platooning concept, and that safe, deployable systems must satisfactorily address these key considerations.

This roadmap to sustainable automotive transportation takes a cyber-physical systems approach to exploring disruptive innovation in the pursuit of clean, safe, and efficient door-to-door mobility in the United States. This integrated assessment addresses the results to an expert forecast on vehicle automation as part of a more far-reaching transformation to connected, automated, and electric vehicles. The expert panel used the Delphi survey method to forecast the market introduction dates, general growth rates, and policy issues of automated shuttle, freeway, urban, and taxi systems over the course of the next few decades. The results are summarized in a scenario for the growth of vehicle automation in the context of persistent road network, land use, population, climate, and technology trends.

With automated vehicles having similarly much technology promise, business opportunity, customer expectation, and implementation challenge, this contribution aims to consider all those different aspects pertaining to what can be called the next stage of personal mobility. A widely used business analysis methodology, Porter’s Five Forces Framework, is applied to discuss the automated vehicle industry and its different players and forces. It becomes evident that there are several different directions toward automated driving, i.e. an evolutionary, a revolutionary, and a transformative path, which are pursued by different players, who do not necessarily compete with one another as it is often suggested. In order to accomplish safe and convenient future mobility, broad collaboration is recommended.

This chapter is summarizing key aspects of a research and development roadmap on smart systems technologies for automated driving which has been edited and published by the European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration (EPoSS) (European roadmap smart systems for automated driving, available online http://​www.​smart-systems-integration.​org/​, 2015, [1]). Starting from a description of the state-of-play in research and development funding, technology roadmaps have been developed based on surveys and consultations among major European automotive manufacturers and supplier. These roadmaps are organized along milestones for implementation of highly automated driving and provide information about content and timescales of actions in research and innovation (R&I) on technology and in framework conditions.

For decades, our lives have depended on the safe operation of automated mechanisms around and inside us. The autonomy and complexity of these mechanisms is increasing dramatically. Autonomous systems such as self-driving cars rely heavily on inductive inference and complex software, both of which confound traditional software-safety techniques that are focused on amassing sufficient confirmatory evidence to support safety claims. In this paper we survey existing methods and tools that, taken together, can enable a new and more productive philosophy for software safety that is based on Karl Popper’s idea of falsificationism.

This paper gives a summary of a recent session dedicated to truck automation opportunities held as part of the Transportation Research Board/Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (TRB/AUVSI) 2014 Automated Vehicle Symposium. Improved safety, efficiency, and productivity, with lower environmental impacts, are all potential benefits of heavy truck automation. Near-term opportunities for more advanced automation technologies in trucks are platooning and low-speed maneuvering. Advanced technologies are being developed for more automated truck operation. This chapter presents the status and trends of truck automation technologies, technical challenges, barriers to deployment, and possible pathways to automation.

There has been a steady increase in automated features in modern vehicles. Vehicles equipped with these features will behave differently in the traffic stream when compared to non-equipped vehicles (different reaction times, gap acceptance, etc.). Many car manufacturers advertise the release of their fully automated vehicles by 2020. However, the interaction between vehicles with different levels of automation and legacy vehicles is still questionable and can potentially have safety concerns. Thus it is important to understand the nature of these interactions to develop traffic safety strategies by mostly relying on a simulation environment. This paper discusses how modeling and simulation can effectively help in understanding critical traffic characteristics in a mixed environment. This understanding will help shape effective policies and management strategies to accommodate automated vehicles in the traffic stream along with legacy vehicles.

The CityMoibil2 project aims at developing and demonstrating Automated Road Transport Systems, ARTS. The philosophy of the project is that the vehicle cannot be automated autonomously; it requires infrastructures and external control systems to be in the picture too. The certification methodology developed by the project (derived from the rail technical standard EN 50126) is demonstrated to guarantee the safe insertion of automated road vehicles in the urban environment; however it requires some adaptation of the environment. It is based on a risk assessment procedure organized in 8 steps. Its application to one section of the Oristano demonstrator is used as example.

During the last decade, there has been a significant effort to develop a variety of Vehicle Automation and Communication Systems (VACS). These are expected to revolutionise the features and capabilities of individual vehicles within the next decades. The introduction of VACS brings along the (sometimes ignored) necessity and continuously growing opportunities for accordingly adapted or utterly new Traffic Management (TM) actions and strategies. This calls for a new era of freeway TM research and practice, which is indispensable in order to accompany, complement and exploit the evolving VACS deployment. Specifically, the development of new traffic flow modelling and control approaches should become a priority in the years to come.

In modern cities and societies the quality of transportation systems and the mobility options offered to their citizens as well as the means for goods transportation, are an indication of how advanced they are. The provision of mobility alternatives and at the same time the alleviation of congestion and pollution are challenges for every city. More and more of them are turning to technology providing better, faster and cheaper ways to move around. As what we call smart cities is becoming the way forward for most of the cities of the modern world, smart or intelligent transportation is one of their main pillars, together with telecommunication and energy. One of the most promising technological solutions, that until recently was considered as science fiction, is the insertion of automation in road transport both for people and for goods which is the focus of this paper. In this paper, the evolution and history of automotive safety systems is presented, from the invention of the seat belt and the airbag to the development of more advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The next step, not forgetting connectivity, in the evolution of safety systems is automation in road transport. Nowadays, several initiatives in this field are ongoing both in Europe and worldwide, however technical challenges and deployment barriers still exist. These are briefly outlined in this paper. The main non-technical challenges are the legal and liability issues but also the way road transport systems, that will include automated elements or will be fully automated, will be organized and controlled. Building on the need to address automation in a structured, holistic and integrated way the paper is introducing the idea of an Automated Transport System (ATS) where there is a shared level of automation between the vehicle and the infrastructure side, in a collaborative scheme. Such novel transport systems are anticipated to lead to improved efficiency, safety and traffic flow and to minimize environmental effects of transport, thus leading to an increased deployment for automated vehicles and to a transformation of smart cities transport system.

This paper describes the purpose, methodology, instruments, organization and participant discussion results at the Friday Ancillary workshop: “Envisioning Automated Vehicles within the Built Environment: 2020, 2035, 2050” during the TRB/AUVSI Automated Vehicles Symposium 2014. This hands-on interactive workshop included 110 participants working as small teams of experts from a wide range of fields—city planning, infrastructure, architecture, car design, engineering, software, and systems—who collaborated on specific built world scenarios focused on the challenges and opportunities for AV/ATN implementation in the United States by regional transportation planning organizations.