Ana Martins – Popós autónomos

May 21, 2018August 17, 2018

Looking at the stars (broken connection: 1/2)

It seems risky to bet on when a technology is going to be in place when it depends exclusively on investigation. Analists are able to make a prevision based on different sources. Besides that, they use different strategies that help them organise thoughts and minimise uncertainty of the final answer. But when you work medium/long term it looks like the answer, even if result on deep reflection, gets confused with guessing like Nostradamus.

Comparison of strategies:

If we look at the development cycle for other technologies on the automotive world, we notice that there is a long period until the final product gets to all markets. The airbag, that is a key feature in any vehicle, took more than 25 years to be integrated in cars around the world; automatic gearbox and navigation systems had an even longer development time; it took more than 30 or 50 years respectively to win the title of mass production²⁰.

However, on these last few years, we’ve seen an accelerated evolution on different technologies in transportation. The investigation of the avanced assistance system is developing different technological capacities that later will feed the autonomous vehicle (Level 5 SAE). Nevertheless some of these technological features are embedded in different models.

The integration of these technologies contributes for the separation of the brands and is an argument in sales marketing. Aren’t we racing for the last technological product helping spreading? For example, eco Driving, in just 3 years was able to consolidate its market share, meaning that between 2012-2015 it was already installed in 25% of new models in Europe²⁶.

Diesel and petrol vehicles substitution by electric vehicles is also today’s news in automotive industry. If, on one hand, the diesel gate news and European policies goes towards more sustainable ways, on the other hand, the development of electric batteries is not a close deal for consumers.

Hybrid vehicles, after 15 years on the market still don’t have a substantial market share²⁰. Would the AV be included in this, a wanted product that will be in eternal development to justify its value?

But what does the press say and the researchers on the field?

April 26, 2018August 17, 2018

Let yourself be driven in city center

Lisbon is in fashion and welcomes more tourists every day. This wave has transformed the city: there are more and more houses for temporary rent, the house prices has rose exponentially leaving only an older population to live in the city centre. But Lisbon is a mobility challenge for the locals with some locomotion difficulty; city with 7 hills, with steep and narrow streets, a very special stone on most sidewalks or no sidewalks at all or even full of incorrectly parked cars.

Imagine transporting an elderly person to the city centre. The driver will stop close to the destination, leave the vehicle and help the person getting into the house. Let’s imagine the same scenario with a AV. Here, we can have some issues:

(1) Who’s going to help the person with disability leaving the autonomous taxi? Could we have a ride-sharing dedicated service, where the taxi driver leaves his/her function of driving and becomes a host?

(2) No driver has problems overtaking a vehicle that is stopped on the road, ever if it’s breaking some rules, but will the AV capable of doing that?

(3) Stop in the middle of the road, causing congestion, can be accepted in critical situations like the one described, that leads to some social compensation. But this is common practice and sometimes with meaningless justifications like waiting for someone or “being right back” when there is a parking spot in 10 m. Will the AV capable of differentiate the level of necessity and acceptance of certain situations?

The future of the central areas, currently with higher parking pressure, can go through not having any areas dedicated to parking on the surface. These lanes could be reserved to drop off passengers or cargo vehicles (avoiding jeopardizing the surrounding traffic, stopping with the four indicators in the middle of the road). Perhaps you can even think of a coexistence area with pedestrians in which you can maximize the use of soil.

April 9, 2018August 17, 2018

Framing AV in EU policies

Autonomous vehicles (AV) are included in a vast group known in the European Union (EU) as Connectivity and Automation in Transport (CAT). These transports are studied by the Innovation and Development department because they answer to three fundamental EU objectives as: (1) contribute to decarbonisation, (2) better efficiency, and (3) competitiveness⁴⁹.

Europe battles for an economy environmental friendly and less dependent of energy consumption, and points out as 2050 objectives:

– reduction of 80% in greenhouse effect,
– and cut of 60 % of emissions;

Compared to 1990 values in different sectors as industry, agriculture, etc.⁵⁰

Among these is also the mobility sector, one of the major responsible by emissions. It is expected that the timed intervention with the fleet replacement by electrical and hybrid vehicles, might help achieve the 60% reduction⁵⁰.

But profound alterations may bring an unwanted disturb. Transports have an enormous impact in society nowadays. On an economic level it employs 12 million on the automotive industry, plus 5 million on a direct level; and it the sector that is most invest in innovation and development⁴⁹.

With the development of new technologies, new solutions arise regarding passenger and cargo transportation. The door is open to create new international markets and, as a consequence, create value to Europe.

However, as the technology evolves the bigger the amount of tests required. Systems are implemented and tested at a greater scale. The implementation time frame is thought to be long and the mobility policies should predict the negative results that with come from this innovation.

March 15, 2018August 17, 2018

The extra hour…

“What if the clock showed 25 hours in a day? What if you could have 1 extra hour?” This is the motto for an Audi campaign that shows the new luxury car equipped with features that assist the normal day driving. The Audi A8 is equipped with traffic jam pilot that allows the driver to use his time in a different way in case of a traffic jam, since the car manages the driving⁴⁴.

This technology is trying to buy us some time, in order for us to do everything that we planned in the morning.

And if we think a little bit in all the time we waist on the day-to-day commute we can get really nervous. A recent study of the European Mobilities Observatory shows that the Portuguese are the ones that most use the car to go to work, compared with other European countries, and that spend an average of 8h 11m traveling during the work days⁴⁵, in different ways of transportation. The home-work commute still take a big part of our lives.

In the US, due to the big distance between cities and the use of cars as the major, if not the only, way of transportation, we can also see a rise on hours on the road. Average values from diferent sources show that the Americans spend around 1h driving⁴⁶.

However, if tomorrow was given a full hour inside an AV, what would we do? An enquire done in 2014, shows that 41% of people, when questioned about the activities that they could do inside an AV, fells the need to look at the road, even if not driving⁴⁷. People are not comfortable with this technology just yet, and identify the motive of their reluctance to a fail in the system⁴⁸. But wouldn’t be great to catch up on our sleeping hours on our way home in the end of the day?

February 16, 2018August 17, 2018

Why now?

The idea of AV was presented for the first time in 1939 by Norman Geddes. And despite it has been only developed by universities and motor companies, was never seen as the “future of transportation” for more than 60 years. What has changed in this century then?

(1) Data storage capacity: in 1956, IBM was launching the first hard drive that stored 5 MB, at a value of 10,000 $/MB³⁵. A quick search at the internet shows us that today it is possible to rent a space on the cloud by 0.007 $/GB/month³⁶.

(2) Network: in 1969 was sent the first message by ARPANET, between the UCLA host (California University, Los Angeles) and SRI host (Stanford Research Institute). In 1981, the number of computers connected to the “internet” was 213. Last year, more than 1,000 million hosts accessed internet by DNS³⁷.

(3) Information processing (CPU): computer costs has been decreasing while its performance increases. In 1961, the IBM unit 1620 was the most evolved one and the cost by GFLOP (operations per second) was around 1.1×10^12 $/GFLOPS; in 2015, the Intel Celeron G1830 costed just about 0.08 $/GFLOPS³⁸.

(4) Bandwidth: the price of bandwidth has been decreasing over the years. In 1998, the price at the USA was around 1,200 $/Mbps; in 2015, price was around 0.63 $/Mbps, that results on an average of 35% price decrease each year³⁹.

We consider that exponential evolution of technology was the biggest impulse for the introduction of AV in our vocabulary. But along this, the funding for AV development by the government, the introduction of new technological companies on the automotive market or events, like DARPA Challenge, that promote visibility to the subject, were also important for the opening of the Pandora box. Do you remember anymore reasons?

(A big thank you to Prof. Luis Bento for his presentation on the subject)

February 2, 2018August 17, 2018

Transform Lisbon city center

Autonomous vehicles promise to reinvigorate city centers. Areas that now live with congestion and noise from the vehicles, could be transform in green areas, large sidewalks and unique spaces to sit and enjoy. But how?

Imagine a visit to Lisbon downtown, get in to the car and drive to the fashion restaurant. On top of having to drive through all the city center confusion, we need to find a place to park, what can be one of the most boring exercises of this trip. An English research says that 30% of the traffic in city centers are due to drivers searching for a parking spot³⁴.

AV’s, due to their capacity to connect to the parking infrastructure (V2I) and to other vehicles (V2V), are capable to access information that allow to choose where to go. The efficiency of this search and routes, avoiding road congestion, allowing to make the trip shorter. This reduction helps energy efficiency and air quality.

But why does the AV needs to be parked in city center? Can the vehicle drop the passengers at their destiny and get away of the center, since it’s autonomous? The pressure to park in the city center is high due to the lack of available spaces, what is reflected on the absurd prices. The AV can park outside the city center taking advantage of the lower prices there, or even at home, where the parking is free.

This way, the space that is now used to park could be converted in places to be enjoyed in the city. We hope that Lisbon, in the future, could be greener, with space to walk, cycle or even play in the street like the old days.

January 18, 2018August 17, 2018

And so it begins…

The replacement of a human being driving a vehicle for a computational system and adequate tools that allow an autonomous driving is not an idea of this century. A small History context allows one to understand the path since the beginning.

The pioneer event for the AV took place in 1939. The AV was presented at the New York World Fair as a projection of a dream. Norman Geddes, sponsored by General Motors, placed the AV as the vehicle that the world would drive in 20 years²⁸. However, the following years had all efforts on the development of war technology by the biggest car manufacturers.

Only in 1977, Tsukuba University in Japan, built, what it may be considered as the first intelligent robotic vehicle²⁹. With cameras and a motherboard it allowed to detect obstacles and follow lines.

In 1983, Carnegie Mellon University, in the USA, developed a model, the Terregator³⁰, that used a combination of lasers, radars and cameras to move without human interaction. Three years later, the NavLab³¹, also manufactured by this university, would have been the first AV to carry people aboard at a maximum speed of 32 km/h.

On the same decade (1980), in Europe, the Bundeswehr München university team developed several projects around the autonomous driving. As a result, in 1994, the team presented a modified S-Class Mercedes-Benz called VaMP, that moved autonomously for more than 1000 km, at a speed of 130 km/h²⁸.

ARGO project³², developed between 1997 and 2001, by Parma university, built a prototype (with image interpretation algorithms) that followed lines painted on a road along 2000 km in six days, with an average speed of 90 km/h with 94% of the time completely autonomous²⁹.

In 2004, DARPA, American defense agency, promoted a challenge to accelerate the development of AV. The participants would have to present a AV that could finish the track created by DARPA. None of the participants finished the challenge that year. The year after, 195 teams participated, Stanford university won and 5 teams finished the challenge: more than 200 km in Nevada without a driver³³. This was a turning point.

The dream is old, but the effort duplicated in the last few years and the investment in R&D for this topic lost limits or barriers. The automotive industry has been pressured by other sectors to develop technology to make this real, specially IT companies that are interested in playing a role in this market.

December 12, 2017August 17, 2018

How accountable am I in an accident?

On a level 3 SAE vehicle if the driver is responsible for an accident, since the driver is supposed to be aware and intervene if necessary¹, then the companies will feel free to develop the technology without any pressure or accountability. Competition between different companies is kept and the evolution tend to be fast.

At this stage, the question is if the driver will react fast enough when required since the reliance on the autonomy of the vehicle might lead to an excess of confidence and lack of attention to the road.

However, driver’s accountability becomes a complicated concept if we’re talking about a level 5 SAE vehicle. On a stage where the advantages of automation may be fully used, it will be possible to integrate people that are not able to drive in a vehicle without an actual driver. Based on these examples, how are we make the driver accountable in case of an accident?

To approach this we should split responsibility between moral and criminal accountability. Relative to the moral accountability there are 2 ideas²⁴ that deserve some attention:

The first one says that since the vehicles are a risk to others, owners/drivers should continue to have accountability over the vehicle. This will force the owner to pay some kind of tax or insurance.

The second one blames the driver in case of an accident. The result or consequences are beyond the driver’s control because one can only be blamed in case of direct intervention. In an example where there is an accident derived from a child running in front of the vehicle, the driver is only accountable if there was any intervention. This second approach is not sustained in itself.

To add to the driver’s accountability, there is the manufacturer accountability that is required to incentive the optimisation of AV. The manufacturer will be, in the end, “the ultimate responsible for the final product”²⁵.

November 28, 2017August 17, 2018

Mobility for everyone.

Nowadays, who doesn’t have a car at the doorstep? Or, if this is not your case, the next question would be: nowadays, who doesn’t have two cars at the doorstep? In Portugal, 2014 statistics, say the around 90% of people travel by car²¹.

Our parents’ generation had the opportunity of acquiring a vehicle and our generations (80’s) grew up with this comfort. Even if the consequences of excessive use well known, who is going to stop using a car?

A few more minutes collecting statistics allow us to know that the prediction for the next few years show that the number of 65 years old will grow²². Older people, due to their experience, are the ones that show a bigger driving knowledge, being able to predict dangerous sceneries easily. However, at the same time, their age take this advantage from them, increasing the physical and mental limitations leading to an increased risk of accidents on the road¹⁷. Just like older people, people under the influence of alcohol and tiredness can see their ability to drive diminished, leading to an increase of the likelihood of an accident. Human error is the cause of 90% of all road accidents²³, without taking in to account minor accidents that are not reported to the authorities.

The AV allows all these people to circulate in the interior without any interaction needed. This way, weakened and disable people are able to move independently, regardless of physical or mental problems that would prevent them to drive a vehicle.

But not everything is perfect. These advantages are also related to some problems when we drive our attention to the operational part. The AV, regardless of its evolution does not replace an human being. Weakened and disable people need help to get in and out of the vehicles. The adaptation of these vehicles to these problems should be investigated and developed to allow the integration of the biggest number of people.

But the arrival of autonomy will allow the mobility of a different group of people, that are not allow to drive today, like youngsters and children, due to their age and immaturity. Can we say that the extra travelling in the end of the day to drive the kids to practice or swimming are over? One more time operational issues have to be carefully thought like allowing kids to travel without supervision or safety.

The AV will have the goal of becoming a transport for everyone, however, the answers to some of the issues raised will be decisive on the integration of different groups of population.