autonomous vehicles – 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 27, 2018August 17, 2018

What about autonomous cars that can fly? Or planes?

When we talk about the future of transportation these days, self-driving vehicles is the first thing that comes to mind, and aerospace is no different. When the discussion starts, relative to cars, the first question is, like we’ve discussed before, the machine’s reaction to an emergency situation. The same thing happens in aerospace again.

The discussion might seem very similar, and it is, however small nuances might give some food for thought that will feed into the discussion regarding cars. There is a common idea that pilots have a lot of experience and are seen as entirely reliable and that is what keeps us safe up there, but the truth is more complex than that. Pilots are indeed very experienced and can save our lives, like Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger who landed US Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus A320-214, on the Hudson River after a bird-strike as it took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport in January 2009. On the other hand we have Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, that has crashed in the Alps in March 2015 with the human factor as a main reason.

Across innumerous articles there is a feeling that people do not trust self-driving planes but the truth is, that some of the accidents are human error. We all know that by now, most of aircraft controls are automatic⁴⁰ and it is possible to do take-off and landing with no pilot interaction, however, we return to the first question: “what about in case of emergency?”. The discussion might never end, but from our perspective pilots do more than just “driving” a plane (pre-flight checks for example) so we think that the discussion with planes will take longer than cars.

We would like to go through the history of “amount of people on the cockpit”, maybe another time, but for now bear in mind that Boeing is thinking about reducing to one single pilot⁴¹ and Airbus is actually working in flying cars so like the cars^42,43, this is happening.

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)

November 14, 2017August 17, 2018

Less road accidents, please.

In Portugal, road accidents are less an less each year. Nevertheless, data from 2015, shows that the number of road accidents and victims continues to be high: 32000 accidents, 41000 serious injuries and 473 deaths¹². The social impact of these numbers is quite high. But there is an economic impact that can’t be seen at first sight. Based on a study about road safety¹³, considering the number of death and injured during 2015, and based on simple math one can say that the impact on Portuguese economy is more than 750 000 000 euros each year.

With the introduction of AV and a total replacement of vehicle fleet, we believe that the fatality rate (by Km traveled per person) might get closer to the aviation and trains one, at around 1 % from the present value¹⁴. The AV will be prepared to face several scenarios, what will help to improve road safety. However it’s not possible to predict all kinds of different situations. The AV system would be ready to give a response to several challenges in a safe way¹⁵. An AV has to be capable of dealing with accidents and road events and behave in a safe way in a different context: driving in all geographic locations, all types of road, traffic conditions or weather conditions⁵. Can we say the same of a human?

But this challenge is not only dependent of technology but also of the transition period. On an optimistic approach we assume the AV can reduce the rate of accidents and injured in 50 %, in short/medium term¹⁶ (market penetration rate of 10 %). This value reflects aspects like the reduction of road code rules violation: for example, cross a red light,something that the AV s not authorised to do.

Other authors are more cautious. Considering that traditional vehicles and AV will share the road, accident rate can even get worse, at least for traditional vehicles¹⁷ that are not used to the new way of driving AV. And increase safety for some endangering others is not actually a benefit, even if in the end the balance is positive¹⁸. In a transitional phase, issues with pedestrian’s safety will also be raised. People’s behaviours are shaped to their expectations. If people consider that the AV will stop every time that that is confronted with a dangerous situation, then the pedestrians might became less cautious and less responsible when close to AV¹⁹ and drivers might try riskier manoeuvres because they feel safer in an autonomous mobility environment²⁰.