The challenges of tomorrow are evident by walking a few heartbreaking blocks of the streets of San Francisco. On the same boulevard where famous tech companies reside, there are often people living on sidewalks who are suffering; suffering from drug addiction, mental health issues and/or the high cost of housing. The resulting externalities mar one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Perhaps it is fitting then, that the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUSVI) held its Automated Vehicle Symposium in San Francisco, as vehicle automation will revolutionize mobility, the built-environment, our work and, if correctly implemented, has the potential to improve the human condition.
Gabe Klein of Fontinalis Partners, who was part of an AVS lunchtime panel, suggested that city planners and policy makers need to start with the focus on people, as they plan for transportation automation. Klein and Seleta Reynolds, General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation discussed NACTO’s recent whitepaper [PDF] that is a guideline for how cities can shape and use the technology to improve the built environment. As a person who has been an executive with tech start-ups (e.g. Zipcar) and head of transportation departments in major cities (Chicago, Washington D.C.), Klein brings an unique perspective that will be explored further in a soon-to-be-published interview.
From a technology perspective, sensor fusion was a recurring theme. Danny Shapiro of Nvidia spoke of how Nvidia’s GPUs effectively put a supercomputer in a car (150 Macbook Pro equivalents squeezed into one relatively compact board). This type of computing power allows inputs from multiple sensors – whether cameras, RADAR, LIDAR, inertial or external inputs – to be weighted, processed and acted upon in real-time.
These multiple sensors also serve as a form of redundancy. For instance,the resolution and wavelength of LIDAR would have been an extra input that would have “seen” the tractor-trailer in the recent and tragic Tesla accident, providing a back-up to the car’s camera and RADAR.
Unfortunately, accidents will be part of the learning process and one of the seven ethics questions posed by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo associate professor of Philosophy Patrick Lin is whether testing autonomous vehicles in live traffic is ethical. He used medicine as an analogy, pointing out that the FDA would never allow commercial deployment of medicine without first having clinical tests. As author of the book Robot Ethics, he has been a thought-leader on this topic for many years. Opining on the fallout from the recent Telsa accident in Florida, Lin suggests that “We are all responsible” and that an ongoing dialogue about these questions, as well as examining the corner cases, are important to the successful rollout of autonomy.
One of the most valuable aspects about a conference like AVS is the hallway discussions.A hallway discussion with CAVCOE’s Paul Godsmark, that will soon be published as video interview, triggered the thought that the transformation we are seeing in transportation parallels the shift by telecom operators from purpose-built hardware to software-defined networks that adapt based on demand. As Godsmark points out, planners and policy makers need to closely examine their fixed infrastructure investments in a world that is quickly evolving to assets that can be utilized at a much greater rate and shifted to where and when demand requires.
Of course, the big difference in the telecom/transportation analogy is that private entities own the fiber, while the roads are typically public. This points to a much tighter private-public collaboration needed for the transportation revolution, as alluded to by Gabe Klein in his presentation.
Like telecom, the impact will definitely be different in rural areas than urban. Some of the low-hanging fruit for connected vehicles and autonomous features are the 45k miles freight routes that traverse the fruited plains. Peloton Technologies presented a compelling case of up to 10% fuel savings and improved safety through a cloud-based truck platooning system. Again, back to the SDN analogy, Peloton Technologies serves as an orchestrator of sorts by dynamically creating virtual trains of tractor-trailers that reduce wind-drag and improve safety through a virtual brake line via Vehicle-to-Vehicle radio communications. This improves safety for not only the trucks, but for the nearby passenger cars.
As with telecom, cyber security was one of the hot topics of discussion and, in his presentation Dr. Jonathan Petit, Principal Scientist, Security Innovation, Inc., suggested the importance of taking a holistic view of security from sensors to software to communications. Cyber security is the biggest insurance concern with respect to autonomous vehicles, according to an April 2016 Munich RE survey of 100 risk managers at the Risk and Insurance Management Society Conference. Munich RE, an insurer of insurers has been leading the insurance industry in tackling the questions regarding the risks and rewards associated with automation, as seen in this interview from 18 months ago. That they now have an offering for low-speed autonomous vehicles speaks to how industry players are addressing one of the perceived barriers to adoption of self-driving technology.
Bryant Walker Smith, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, brought his unique experience as a former traffic engineer and current legal expert on the impact of autonomy. He indicated that the court of public opinion may ultimately be more important to the manufacturers, service providers and government officials than specific laws. As such, setting the proper expectations to the public is key to success, as a large trough of disappointment will create a huge hurdle to the widespread deployment of autonomous features. To minimize the inevitable trough, transparency is going to be particularly important in showing how safety [and its closely related cousin, cyber security] will be important to winning public approval.
And this gets back to one of the key points from Gabe Klein’s talk and of his book, Start-Up City, about the importance of having a two-way dialogue with the very people an entity is trying to serve; whether that entity is a private organization or a local government. Stripping away all the amazing technology, both the private and public entities need to put people at the center of the ever unfolding autonomous transformation.
Stay tuned for the aforementioned video interviews and more.
