Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Q&A: Tom Bamonte Tom Bamonte serves as the general counsel for the North Texas Tollway Authority. Over the past five years he’s written articles and made presentations to legal and transportation industry groups on driverless and driver-assisted technology. He maintains a Twitter site devoted to the technology (@TomBamonte) and is a contributor to Driverless Car HQ. Q: What are the major legal hurdles you see on the horizon for self-driving car technology A: I’m actually an optimist in this area and am confident that the legal system will be capable of handling liability issues arising from this technology, just has it with all sorts of new technologies over the past century. There is a risk of overregulation where folks, primarily the federal government, may prematurely come in and attempt to occupy the field and slow the rapid pace of innovation in this area. But overall, I’m optimistic that our legal system can handle this technology without any significant reconfiguration or major changes. Q: How do you think the issue of privacy will come to play in connected vehicle and connected infrastructure debates A: We in the toll industry have a lot of experience dealing with highway users and privacy. What we’ve learned is this: Users are very concerned about having data about their individual travel patterns shared. We don’t get a lot of resistance, however, to us harvesting data from travel patterns as a whole to improve safety, traffic management, etc. As long as connected vehicle technology is used for general data harvesting, as opposed to tracking individual drivers, we’ve set a good example in the toll industry of how to find an acceptable balance. Q: In what ways do you imagine cities changing once driverless cars become a ubiquitous technology A: There’s been some work in this area suggesting that driverless vehicle technology will promote sprawl. I think the opposite may be true. More efficient use of existing highway space, which is what this technology offers, allows cities to have more density around their existing highway networks. What that means is that if you could double, triple, even quadruple the carrying capacity of existing streets, and especially expressways, you could have denser retail and residential development around our existing highway system. So I see this technology as a way to densify urban development, as opposed to it being something that will further promote sprawl. Q: Many states, with varying transportation needs and population densities, are looking into passing driverless car legislation. Do you have an opinion on how different regions with different densities should take these types of factors into account when writing driverless car legislation A: I don’t think the law needs to reflect the different levels of density and urban development in our states. We’re early enough in the development curve that just getting vehicles out there to be tested, and have the highway authorities and cities and states working in this area, is what we need. We’re all going to figure it out together. At this point I think it’d be premature to have a different driverless vehicle law for, say, Montana or Wyoming versus Connecticut or another densely populated state. Q: What immediate benefits do you foresee in creating the proper infrastructure for selfdriving or connected vehicles A: There are opportunities to facilitate the deployment of driverless and connected vehicle technologies by selected infrastructure improvements. On expressways, for example, could the road communicate useful information to vehicles in such a way that we could have driverless vehicle lanes that provide guaranteed travel times from point to point On the safety side, there may be ways for the infrastructure to talk to vehicles to disable cars that are going in a wrong-way direction. Wrong-way vehicles cause a lot of damage, a lot of accidents, and there could be a way 14 MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013
Q & A for the infrastructure to communicate to the wrongway vehicles and pull them to the shoulder until law enforcement can arrive. We could save hundreds of lives each year. Q: Infrastructure changes are often costly. Do you see the cost benefit as worthwhile versus implementing changes only to a vehicle’s onboard technology A: I think it’s premature to willy-nilly invest in driverless vehicle technology infrastructure. Frankly, most of it hasn’t been invented yet. The challenge that we face as highway authorities is, at some point, as the driverless vehicle technology gets more sophisticated, we’re going to need to have some pretty fundamental discussions about whether we want to increase roadway capacity through investing in electronic platforms versus pouring more concrete and expanding our physical facilities. I think that what makes sense from a cost-benefit analysis now is for cities and highway authorities to partner up with the auto manufacturers; other innovators, such as Google in this area; and local research institutions to figure out exactly what does a highway of the future look like. That future highway is probably based on wireless communications and involves a fiberoptic backbone, both of which we have already in some form. There’s probably a generation of sensors that allow communications between vehicles and infrastructure. Again, a lot of it remains to be invented, so what we need to do now is invest in that research and work together on some visioning and hopefully some solutions. Q: What are examples of simple infrastructure solutions cities could implement that better enable driverless cars A: Here’s something that we’re already thinking about: Do you paint your roadways differently so that sensor-equipped vehicles can read the roadway more effectively Existing vehicles now are coming equipped with lane-changing technologies, where the vehicle alerts you if you’re steering out of your lane. Could ‘We’re in the equivalent of the early 1900s. They didn’t wait back then for the interstate highway system to deploy the Model T. They put the Model T out there on the dirt roads, and when it rained the horse did better. Yet, it was the release of new vehicular technology that prompted the development of paved roads and ultimately the interstates. A similar process is happening now.’ we enhance that technology just through better striping Are there ways to make vehicles, guardrails and other highway features visually more resonant to lidar, infrared and photo sensors One of the things we can and should be doing right now is considering how do we remake the look of our roadways using existing elements so that driverless and connected vehicles can operate more effectively and safely. Beyond that, we’re all waiting on the federal government to move on the 5.9-gigahertz wireless spectrum. If we finally get that as an established standard, we can talk about developing sensors that broadcast road condition information and upcoming traffic information and stoplight technology that alerts vehicles to another vehicle that’s going to run a light. Those kind investments could be good ones in the relative near term. Q: How can cities better prepare themselves for driverless cars that could soon be coming to their roads A: At this point what’s needed is for folks to identify the upsides and downsides of the technology and use local, regional, state and federal resources to try to figure out ways to facilitate the deployment of autonomous and connected vehicle technology. We’re in the equivalent of the early 1900s. They didn’t wait back then for the interstate highway system to deploy the Model T. They put the Model T out there on the dirt roads, and when it rained the horse did better. Yet, it was the release of new vehicular technology that prompted the development of paved roads and ultimately the interstates. A similar process is happening now. Google and other innovators are going to be putting the driverless vehicles out there on “dumb” 20th century infrastructure. It’s going to take a while for the infrastructure to catch up with “smart” cars, just as it took a while for the interstate highway system to catch up with the descendents of the Model T. That’s where I see us going. The key question is what’s the infrastructure platform that will make the onboard driverless/ connected vehicle technology work more effectively and more safely MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013 15
Page 1 and 2: VOLUME 3 NO.2 • May 2013 • AUVS
Page 3 and 4: CONTENTS VOLUME 3 NO.2 • May 2013
Page 5 and 6: Editorial Vice President of Communi
Page 7 and 8: Essential Components Someday, Will
Page 9 and 10: STATE OF THE ART OXFORD, U.K. Unive
Page 11 and 12: Self-driving trucks take to the roa
Page 13 and 14: Orlando2013_Rotor_ad_LISA_REV_Layou
Page 15: Technology Gap Driving Down the Cos
Page 19 and 20: TIMELINE 2005 - DARPA reconvened fo
Page 21 and 22: model of incremental improvements,
Page 23 and 24: THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF UNMANNED AIR
Page 25 and 26: Testing Testing The industry can ad
Page 27 and 28: Spotlight Fleet Automation Forum Wo
Page 29 and 30: End Users Is Your Guy Fraker Driver
Page 31 and 32: 12-15 August Walter E. Washington C

Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?