Collaboration, Connection Will be Key to Automated Vehicle Adoption
Nat Beuse, NHTSA. Photo: AUVSI.
Speakers on the final day of the Automated Vehicles Symposium, held this week in Ann Arbor, Michigan, stressed that international collaboration will be key to finding answers to the research issues that surround the widespread adoption of driverless car technology.
Ludger Rogge, a research program officer for the European Commission, discussed the member states’ Horizon 2020 program, which will funnel research and development money into new technologies, including automated and connected vehicles.
“What is new in this framework program is it tries to support funding for the entire research chain, ... and it covers also all areas of science and innovation,” he said. The project will tackle societal challenges and “transport is one of the most important ones.” This is reflected in project’s budget, he says, which has allotted €6 billion for transportation research through 2020. Automated vehicle initiatives will be funded €110 million for 2016 and 2017.
“We want to do that first of all for passenger cars, and the main objective is to integrate and test enabling technologies for passenger cars for level three, but it can also go up to level four,” he said, referring to the definitions of levels of vehicle automation outlined by the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.
The program currently has a draft of concepts for the operational tests that will occur in that timeframe. And although the funding cannot apply to nonmember states, Rogge says the initiative welcomes stateside partners.
U.S. Department of Transportation Program Manager Kevin Dopart, who works in the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, said the agency was meeting later this week with European Union and Japanese automated vehicle efforts to ensure information from similar project results are shared.
“We are looking to more closely align some research projects for the benefit of all involved,” he said
Dopart was also among the many speakers that stressed autonomous vehicles will not reach their full potential without being coupled with connected vehicle technology.
“Anything an autonomous vehicle can do we believe a connected automated vehicle can do better,” he said.
It will be crucial to test out spectrum issues for long-term availability, which the agency plans on doing, he said.
“It’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said, adding it will create a sustainable and safer society. “The point here, we believe in that 30-year outlook it is critical to have connectivity to make it happen, especially on the mobility side.”
Nat Beuse from NHTSA said his agency is going to initially focus on rolling connected technology onto the light vehicle fleet on an aggressive schedule, and it plans on using its findings from that to fuel the rollout onto the heavy vehicle fleet.
Beuse also discussed the recent hot topic of cybersecurity and connected and autonomous vehicles. The agency released a cybersecurity document this Tuesday discussing its approach.
“It is similar to what we did for the automated policy statement, basically for cybersecurity,” he said. The document is the result of discussions with government agencies and other players.
“When we first started talking about it a few years ago, it was always like everything was too hard so nobody was going to do it,” he said.
NHTSA has established a group that is looking into what data should be collected by onboard systems and what data it will need when something bad happens. Beuse also said consumers need to know about these onboard systems and, perhaps, could get state-level training on them.
