The Exploratory Advanced Research Program

Recent International Activity in Cooperative Vehicle–Highway Automation Systems

COMPARISON WITH CURRENT U.S. STATUS

U.S. Activities

Although the United States established a clear position of international leadership in CVHAS in the mid-1990s, the level of activity in this area has declined significantly since then. There have been several R&D efforts continued in recent years but at relatively modest funding levels. The following experiments have used full–scale vehicles with partial or full control of driving functions and V2V or V2I cooperation:

• Transit bus lateral guidance and steering control—University of California PATH Program and University of Minnesota ITS Institute, with support from the Federal Transit Administration, ITS Joint Program Office, and their respective State Departments of Transportation.
  
  
• Heavy truck longitudinal platoon control—University of California PATH Program, with support from FHWA’s Exploratory Advanced Research Program.
  
  
• CACC—University of California PATH Program, with support from FHWA’s Exploratory Advanced Research Program, Caltrans, and Nissan.

There has also been a simulation study of the operation of arterial intersections with fully automated vehicles—using a slot reservation protocol to provide system–level coordination of their movements—by the University of Texas at Austin with support from FHWA’s Exploratory Advanced Research Program.

General Motors has entered the CyberCar world with their development of a two-person, two-wheeled dynamically balanced vehicle called the EN/V (pronounced envy) in collaboration with Segway. The first technical documentation of this vehicle was presented at the 2011 ITS World Congress in Orlando, FL, combined with a public demonstration of the vehicle (which was also exhibited very prominently at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo).⁽³²⁾ The EN/V showed sophisticated short–range obstacle detection and avoidance and automated platooning capabilities, including completely unmanned and remote–controlled operations, which appear to exceed the technical capabilities of the analogous but more highly publicized European developments.

Much media attention has been attracted by the DARPA Challenges for autonomous automated vehicles and the subsequent announcement by Google that it is experimenting with autonomous automated vehicles on public roads in the vicinity of its headquarters. A variety of university research groups have also been working on autonomous automated driving research, but these activities are outside the scope of this review.

Similarities and Differences Between Overseas and U.S. Situations

This review of current international status on road vehicle automation has revealed some significant similarities and differences between the situations overseas and in the United States. Resources to support new developments are tight everywhere, but the current level of activity appears to be higher overseas and the planning horizons are longer.

Similarities

The growing use of hybrid–electric and all–electric powertrains has increased the in-vehicle electrical power availability and voltage significantly, making it easier to add electronic and electro-mechanical subsystems, such as the sensors and actuators needed for automated driving. Electronic actuation systems for steering, braking, and engine control are becoming standard equipment on more vehicles, leading to increased production economies of scale.

The research teams working on automation have encountered some of the same primary operational concept dilemmas as the NAHSC did in the 1990s, without resolving them. These dilemmas are as follows:

• To what extent do automated vehicles need to be segregated from general non–automated traffic to ensure their safety?
  
  
• How much of the vehicle control responsibility should be transferred from the driver to the vehicle automation systems and under which conditions?
  
  
• Is it better for automated vehicles to be totally autonomous, or is it better for them to communicate and actively coordinate maneuvering with each other and/or with guidance or even some degree of control from the infrastructure?

Institutional issues, such as uncertainties about liability exposure, are impeding more active development and implementation of automated driving systems. Vehicle manufacturers are reluctant to provide functions that could remove the driver from the vehicle control loop without some assurance about their liability exposure in the event of a crash. In Europe, the situation is further complicated by the Vienna Convention and legal systems that handle this issue differently, motivating the need for European–level harmonization of policies and possibly legislation.

Differences

• The primary motivation for applications of vehicle automation in Europe and Japan is saving energy and reducing CO2 emissions, whereas the primary motivations in the United States have been associated with mobility, safety, and driver convenience.
  
  
• The primary public sector support for vehicle automation system development in Europe and Japan has come from agencies whose missions are oriented toward economic competitiveness, the information technology industry, or more general research and technology enhancement. By contrast, transportation technology support in the United States has historically come from the U.S. Department of Transportation (or Department of Energy), which are more directly focused on the improvements in transportation measures of effectiveness or energy efficiency and self-sufficiency.
  
  
• The European thinking about driving automation has been colored significantly by the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which specifies a uniform set of rules and policies. Some of the Vienna Convention language about driver responsibilities has loomed large over automation discussions in Europe, although these concerns appear quaint from a U.S. perspective, because the Convention does not apply in the United States (or Japan) and can be amended if necessary.
  
  
• European and Japanese auto manufacturers have already introduced a wider range of advanced driver assistance systems across a wider range of vehicle models, including those in moderate price ranges, in their home markets than in the United States. This means that drivers in those countries have been exposed to more sophisticated warning and control assistance systems than their U.S. counterparts, in large part because they have shown more willingness to pay a higher price to gain those greater capabilities.
  
  
• European and Japanese projects have been focusing their attention primarily on partially automated systems rather than fully automated systems and have tended to start from the assumption that new dedicated lanes will not be available for use by automated vehicles. This appears to be a consequence of their higher density urban development patterns and high urban land costs. In the United States, with somewhat lower density and land costs, significant attention has been given to automated vehicles that could be physically segregated from other road users.
  
  
• European and Japanese projects have increased their emphasis on automation issues within the past 4 years, whereas the United States has funded very little work on automation within the past decade after establishing an international leadership role in this area in the 1990s.

Implications of These Contrasts for Future U.S. Actions

The United States pioneered thinking about and development of road traffic automation systems for several decades, from the GM Futurama of the late 1930s⁽⁸⁾ through the NAHSC research and demonstration of the late 1990s. During the past decade, Army research, the DARPA Challenges, and the ensuing Google development work have advanced technologies for individual vehicle-oriented automation, largely independent of traffic considerations. At the same time, the levels of activity in road traffic automation have increased significantly in Europe and Japan, to the extent that at this point in time they probably have the leading expertise in the world in several key areas:

• Automated truck platooning
  (Energy ITS in Japan).
  
  
• Automated buses (several European projects).
  
  
• PRT (e.g., ULTra PRT at Heathrow and 2getthere at Masdar).
  
  
• Human factors and partial automation concepts (HAVEit project in Europe).

The sponsors of the European and Japanese work have strong interests in industrial competitiveness and in developing their ability to export products to the rest of the world. Unless the United States invests some effort in automation systems soon, it will have no choice but to import the systems from Europe and Japan when it needs them.

The European and Japanese systems, however, have been developed based on somewhat different requirements, needs, and economic and societal constraints derived from the characteristics of their transportation systems. For example, the density of development and land costs in Europe and Japan are substantially higher than in the United States, which leads them to reject the concept of dedicated lanes for automated vehicles a priori. The automobiles currently being sold in other countries are substantially better equipped with advanced driver assistance systems than are U.S. vehicles (and indeed most of the vehicles that have these systems in the United States are imported from Europe or Japan). This means that the incremental costs of adding automation capabilities are likely to be smaller in Europe and Japan, because they are starting from a higher baseline. Both of these factors tend to tilt toward more vehicle-intensive solutions in other countries than what may be ideal for U.S. applications.

The United States still retains some important strengths relative to Japan and Europe in the field of automation:

• Availability of comprehensive traffic safety and crash data to provide more insight into traffic safety and crash causality specific to the U.S. environment. As a result, the safety–oriented system designs can be targeted most effectively at solving the most important and relevant safety problems.
  
  
• A well–developed transportation human factors research community that can focus on designing systems that are safe and easy to use, without creating new safety or usability problems.
  
  
• A substantial research community with vehicle automation knowledge and experience developed over decades of work in both the road transportation and military domains.
  
  
• A road network with a relatively high percentage of travel on limited–access highways, where it is likely to be simplest to implement automation technologies.
  
  
• Recent and current projects that can provide the technological foundations for new developments (GM’s EN-V, Google’s driverless cars, PATH’s automated trucks and buses and CACC, GM’s Exploratory Advanced Research project on partial automation).
  
  
• System engineering approaches and expertise, to design and develop solutions to problems rather than solutions looking for problems.

The United States can build on the combination of its extensive heritage of experience and capabilities relative to automated road transport, its current areas of international leadership, and the knowledge being developed in current programs in other countries to develop a robust program in automated road transportation. The focus should be on areas in which U.S. needs differ from the needs of other countries and where it can build on the strengths that it already has. Suggested actions include:

• Conduct concept studies of a range of automation applications to address transportation problems in the United States in an effort to identify which could be most beneficial. This should be done to establish an “application pull” approach to automation system development, in contrast to some of the international activities which have been more of a technology push.
  
  
• Build on the BASt study of legal issues in Germany, focusing on the differences between German and American law, to establish what the realistic legal issues and constraints are in the United States.
  
  
• Build on the recent GM studies of driver interactions with partially automated vehicles to develop a systematic set of data regarding drivers’ ability to resume control of a vehicle after they have been engaged in non-driving activities for an extended time.
  
  
• Pursue more in–depth work on truck platooning to complement current activities in Japan and Europe. This should include refining the concepts of operation for truck platooning systems to address both urban and intercity applications, experimental work to develop reliable quantitative data about the fuel and emissions-saving potential of the concepts, and benefit–cost studies to support the definition of business cases for further development and deployment.
  
  
• Seek opportunities to collaborate with the European and Japanese programs where synergies can be identified. The technical issues are sufficiently challenging that it should be to the benefit of everybody to distribute the needed work among the experts on all continents so that progress can be accelerated.