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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.

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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)

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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.