When it comes to driving, there is so much cool technology. Maybe not flying cars, but it’s the 21st century, shouldn’t we at least have cars that drive themselves?
We’re not quite at the Jetson’s flying cars… yet. When it comes to autonomous vehicles, a lot of pieces of the puzzle have to land in the right place and in the right order before we can just set it and forget it, relax and read a book while the car takes care of the rest.
For example, when we start a trip, we generally know where we’re going and what route we are going to take. But what happens if there’s construction ahead or if there’s an accident? If only there was a way for the roads themselves to let us know what’s in store for us on our trip.
That’s where the researchers at UW Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory (or TOPS lab). So what’s the difference between autonomous vehicles and what they’re working on?
Transportation Systems Engineer, Jon Riel says, “An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle eventually driving itself, without a driver. A connected vehicle doesn’t need to be autonomous at all. It could be a human driven vehicle that’s just connected to other vehicles, to infrastructure, or other devices.”
Think of connected vehicles as a stepping stone toward autonomous vehicles. As a matter of fact there are 6 different levels of autonomy.
“Level zero would be a car you’d get in from the ’90s or early 2000s. So you might have automatic transmission, ABS systems, things like that. But they’re not anything that’s assisting you with the driving task itself.” says Riel.
Most new cars you buy nowadays are Level 1, adaptive cruise control, lane deviation warnings or correction, things like that.
What they’re looking at in Madison and other locations can fall into any of the levels from 1 to 5.
Incidentally, level 5 is “Set it and Forget it.” The car can do all the driving for you, including evasive maneuvering, follow detours etc. without much input from the “driver”.
One application of this technology could be as simple as dealing with someone running a red light.
Riehl explains, “If everything is connected, the vehicle running the red light would be sending a message to the intersection. The intersection would be processing that and saying, ‘wait a second, this vehicle is approaching a red signal at a speed too fast for them to be able to stop before they enter it. It would then process out a safety message that would be sent to the other vehicles in the area that are connected. So your vehicle, even if it’s a level 1, will now get this message way ahead of time, before you would have seen the vehicle, and you’ll be able to slow down and stop.”
Obviously, there are more than just that application. As a matter of fact, the possibilities are endless.
Madison’s Assistant City Traffic Engineer, Yang Tao says that from the city’s perspective, they have many expectations ranging from the city buses’ on-time performance to congestion and emissions control. That’s just for the short term.
For the long term, rather than spending millions of dollars expanding the roadway like many other communities are doing, Tao says they want to use this technology to make transportation SMARTER to use what we have more efficiently.
Find out more information here about what UW Madison is doing to get closer to automated vehicles.
-PART 2-
So, how close are we, really, to actually getting to the autonomous stage?
Well, we’re already seeing some of the automated technology. You have the adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, and lane keep assistance. So, in a way, the future is now.
The DOT’S Strategic Initiatives Officer, Brad Basten and he says even the connected technology is showing up,
“Your car connects to your phone Bluetooth and you have WAZE and Google Maps. Google Maps is connecting your phone and finding where the traffic is. So you already have a version of that with connected vehicles.”
And as for the driverless cars, well, that’s another kettle of fish. You see, driverless vehicles are not legal in Wisconsin,
“State law requires an operator to be behind the wheel and if physical control of the vehicle at all times,” explains Basten.
Not only that, but at the moment, owning your own is pretty cost prohibitive.
Basten says, “They’re pretty expensive, probably a quarter million dollars so you can’t buy one if the question of you want to buy one yourself personally? Yeah that’s probably got to be 10 years away. I would have to guess.”
Well there are communities where they’ve been out and about.
“California. San Francisco Phoenix. I think, Houston as well. There’s a couple of companies that have been running driverless taxis, tens of millions of miles in the last few years they’ve had great results with safety without drivers in those cars,” says Basten.
Interesting. And a little creepy. Anecdotally I’ve chatted with my teammates around here and a recurring theme keeps coming up. “I don’t think I trust a human not being in control.” And I can’t blame them. You might have seen some of the videos and tik toks of people riding and driverless taxis called waymo’s out in California. And the general reaction is nervous giggles and low-key fear.
Well, there is another application. Semi Trucking.
Basten explains, “Later this winter there’s a corridor outside Houston, Texas, where two companies are going to deploy driverless semis that have been tested extensively. So that will be very interesting to watch. Again they have been proven very safe and the Texas DOT is monitoring that.”
But how does Interstate Trucking work if in one state, it’s legal, and in the next it isn’t? Well, there may still be a benefit.
“It’s still effective in that if you were in a state that allowed a driverless truck, the operator could sleep. So he could catch up on some of that mandated time that he needs to sleep, and then he may have to drive through a certain state,”says Basten.
That being said, there are a ton of legal hurdles that need to be jumped before driverless semis become “a thing.”
In the interest of that, and all the other stakeholder industries that get touched by this type of technology, a sort of think tank has been assembled, called WAVE (Wisconsin Automated Vehicle External Advisory Committee). Call it a cross section of society and they all have input on how this type of technology is going to be handled.
“That group is a group of lawmakers, state, and local, and federal agency representatives, some academics nonprofits and industry professionals. And they provide input and advice to WisDOt on CAV priorities policies and impacts that they see to the safe and efficient transportation system. We’ve tried to hit all the areas that this technology might affect so that we can learn how to deploy it safely and efficiently with this advice from these outside groups,” says Basten.
Sure getting into your car and pushing a few buttons and relaxing sounds like a glorious advancement to travel, but it looks like it’s going to be a while before the technology is in place, the laws to make it safe get enacted, and people finally start feeling comfortable enough to let it happen.
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