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.