By Lori O’Toole, chief copy editor
On the morning of Sept. 6, my phone alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. — a full 30 minutes earlier than it had the previous two months — and I groaned into my pillow. School was officially back in session, and I knew that I’d be fighting a losing battle against the cars, bikes, and buses that were back on the road, so I had to factor extra time into my commute. In a perfect, non-rush-hour world, driving the 35 miles from my home to the office takes 40 minutes, but on that particular morning, it took me 85 minutes.
As I sat in virtually standstill traffic, I fantasized about a world in which I could just hop into a car, tell it to take me to work, and then sit back and let my mind wander as I traveled along uncongested roads. The thing is, my fantasy isn’t all that far-fetched. The technology for AI-driven vehicles is being developed and tested under real-world conditions. It may be a winding path to the truly autonomous car, but it’s an exciting time for automakers and their consumers.
“In today’s world, a car is much more than just a four-wheel vehicle with a combustion engine that can achieve great speeds on an open road,” said Kent Robinett, vice president of business management in the automotive business unit of Maxim Integrated. “New-car buyers are looking for safety systems that make them better drivers, infotainment platforms that enhance their driving experience, and technology that keeps up with the rest of their lives.”
That sounds like a tall order, but it’s one that engineers are working to fill. “Meeting these needs can be challenging, especially when the next generation of cars are expected to drive themselves,” said Robinett. “With semiconductor content increasing dramatically in new automotive designs, today’s designers have a huge opportunity to design the car of the future.”
What if you never had to sit in this ever again? Image credit: Shutterstock.
Safety: the key to a driverless world
The biggest concern among developers of autonomous driving systems is safety, and it’s easy to understand why. If I’m going to relinquish control and rely on a computer to get me from Point A to Point B, I want to know that I’ve got an even better chance of getting there unharmed than if I drove myself.
My own alertness has protected me from people hitting me while merging (perhaps they just weren’t looking), running red lights where I was about to cross (perhaps they were busy texting), and even driving at me on the wrong side of the road (perhaps they were intoxicated). Will the invisible driver taking me where I need to go take the same precautions?
“Studies based on existing ADAS [advanced driver assistance systems] data demonstrate that you can prevent a large number of road accidents,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, head of the automotive and industrial lines of business at ARM. “[The data has] shown a reduction in accidents in Europe and Japan through ADAS, and autonomous vehicles will bring more and increased safety capabilities.” When you consider that there were about 40,000 U.S. highway fatalities in 2016 and that 94% of car accidents can be attributed to human error, according to the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, this is encouraging to hear.
Mandyam added that autonomous functionality is particularly beneficial to at-risk groups such as teenagers or new drivers. “If you think especially about young drivers on the road for the first time with their smartphones and other distractions, having that autonomous capability gives you a sense of ease.”
John Buszek, Renesas’ ADAS marketing manager, agrees that driverless cars will improve safety. “An autonomous vehicle will never be tired, will never be under the influence of alcohol, and will always look all around the car in every direction,” he said. “The technology could certainly potentially reduce the amount of accidents and fatalities.”
Companies like Renesas are developing technology to ensure that driverless systems will reliably perform as intended. “When you’re in a plane, you may ask yourself, ‘How am I sure that nothing will go wrong, and how am I sure that the plane’s built to deal with it if something does go wrong?’” said Buszek. “The same situation will take place with autonomous driving, where [the] electronics are not only going to have a lot of performance but also will always need to work.”
Fewer distracted drivers on the road, plus a system that’s constantly watching what’s going on around it, equal a reduced risk for accidents. It will be a hurdle for people to accept the loss of control; intellectually, we might understand that some accidents are unavoidable, but psychologically, we feel safer knowing that we command the vehicle. Giving that up for a new technology won’t feel safe at first. But it’s not all that different from entrusting our lives to an airplane pilot, a ship captain, a train conductor, or even a bus driver — and in many of those situations, we’ve never even seen the face of the person controlling the vehicle. If anything, the reduction in human error — texting, intoxication, fatigue — should put us more at ease.
Putting the brakes on traffic jams
Accident reduction alone can decrease traffic buildup, but how many self-driving cars will need to be deployed on the road before we see significantly less-congested roadways? According to a recent study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it won’t take a whole lot.
“Our experiments show that with as few as 5% of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior,” said Daniel Work, assistant professor at the university and a lead researcher on the study. By experimenting with more than 20 vehicles driving around a circular track (the video below illustrates the concept), researchers from several universities demonstrated that controlling the velocity of just a single vehicle in the flow can reduce the amount of braking from the cars behind it, thus lessening the stop-and-go waves of traffic.
Furthermore, because stop-and-go traffic jams increase fuel consumption in cars, relieving traffic congestion will lower fuel consumption. The team of researchers calculated an average savings of 40% across all of the cars in the experiment. For a busy family, that could translate to fewer trips to the gas station and more money in their pocket.
Owning a car is expensive, and the costs are only going up. With services like Uber and Lyft rising in popularity, we could see a reduction in car ownership in the not-too-distant future.
“I think that in five to 10 years, people are going to start to think about car ownership in a different way,” said ARM’s Mandyam. “Maybe we will see more people sharing a car between friends or family members based on scheduling according to their needs. People may view cars differently as an asset. We could see a divide between people owning cars for the sheer pleasure of driving versus for commuting purposes.”
Ride-sharing and even shared ownership could lead to far fewer cars on the road, which could mean even less traffic.
Autonomy, security, and terrorism
The car was invented primarily to make travel easier, but in modern times, it has been put to a sinister use that its early developers wouldn’t have imagined. The last 15 months alone have seen dozens of attacks in which drivers deliberately drove their vehicles into pedestrians in violent acts of terrorism. With increasingly tightened security on airplanes and in venues such as concert halls, it’s not hard to understand why vehicle-ramming attacks have become much more common.
Anybody can own a car (even without a license in some countries), ramming attacks are virtually impossible to predict, and the results can be large-scale. ADAS and autonomous driving systems are designed to prevent the kinds of collisions and injuries that terrorists seek to cause. But these controls can still be overridden, either by a vehicle occupant or by a hacker who exploits a system vulnerability to commandeer a vehicle remotely.
Technology to harden automotive control systems against tampering could emerge in the next decade, eventually leading to a decreased number of vehicle-ramming attacks, according to Emil Bolongaita, head of Carnegie Mellon University Australia. “The goal is to manufacture vehicles with artificial intelligence in them so that they will refuse to crash and proceed when there is a human being in front of them,” he said. By removing the human from the equation, the car becomes immune to full range of human foibles, from murderous impulses to smaller-scale, yet still dangerous, conditions such as road rage, fatigue, and general distractions.
But if this technology is still a decade away, how can consumers feel safe until then? According to Mandyam, the automotive industry is well aware that consumers are paying close attention to security in autonomous cars and is working to make them as safe as possible. “People are looking to embrace security standards,” she said. “As a tech provider, it’s something we’re always thinking about, and enabling security down to the smallest microcontroller is a part of what we do. By doing this, you are reducing the risk for these types of attacks.”
So when will we see driverless cars?
If you’re one of the many who are eagerly anticipating the arrival of non-human drivers on the roads, you may not have too much longer to wait. On Sept. 6 — the same day the school year started, ruining my morning commute — the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution (SELF DRIVE) Act, a bill that advances the testing, development, and eventual deployment of autonomous vehicles.
“Self-driving cars hold the promise of making America’s roads safer, creating new economic opportunities, and helping seniors and those with disabilities live more independently,” Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, said in a joint statement. “The SELF DRIVE Act strikes the critical balance of enhancing consumer safety while promoting the continued development of this cutting-edge technology.”
On Oct. 4, the Senate Commerce Committee approved its own bipartisan deal on self-driving car legislation. While the bill must still pass a Senate vote, it appears to be on track. Both bills would allow for the sale of self-driving cars as long as the level of safety is at least equal to current requirements for regular cars. Manufacturers would be required to submitsafety evaluation reports, including information on crashworthiness, cybersecurity, and safety.
But even after Congress signs off, next-generation self-driving vehicles will still need to be tested and developed further. SAE International defines the six levels of automated driving in its standard J3016, ranging from 0 to 5. In a Level 5 system, we would see full automation in areas of steering and acceleration, monitoring of driving environment, and fallback performance. In other words, nothing about the actual task of driving would be controlled by a human. The industry is currently at Level 2 (partial automation), and though we are slowly climbing, we may still have a little while to wait before we reach the highest level.
Riding in a car but relaxing as if you are at home? The goal is in sight, but we aren’t quite there yet. Image credit: Alix Paultre.
Buszek’s guess is that we’ll see fully autonomous consumer vehicles after 2025. “The first phase of autonomous driving will involve some sort of partial automation system at the consumer level, as well as shared fleets that might have many more automated driving features but are not necessarily intended for a consumer to go to the dealership and buy,” he said. “The cost of those cars makes more sense for an organization’s or company’s use. In the case of consumer cars, it will be far more gradual.”
So we might not see Level 5 automation next year or possibly even in five years. But we are closer now than we have ever been.
The appeal of the self-driving car lies not only in the increased safety and potential energy savings, but in the lost time we’ll get back. With the car handling the driving, we’ll be free to while away our commute time however we please. And with a shorter commute, we’ll have more personal time at the beginning and end of every workday.
You can’t put a price on that.
Read the full EV Special Report here.
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