Numerous things are currently happening in the world. Many peoples, companies, business models, organizations, not to mention the environment, are struggling. Things we have taken for granted are no longer certain. Whenever we are in times of changes, I usually think of two quotes: “Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling” and “Always look on the bright side of life.” In this column, we will do just that—the latter, that is. Potentially, the insightful reader will detect that we also cover the first quote.
Even the American Trucking Association (ATA) is in favor of introducing commercial connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). It is believed that CAVs will facilitate the work of the truck driver and help overcome the driver shortage by enabling autonomous driving on stretches of roads that are less tractable to human drivers. If the trucking association is this insightful, it is time for the rest of society to join the quest for safer and more efficient transport systems.
Autonomous vehicles are already commercially operational in the United States, and automation Level 4 testing is ongoing in Japan and China. This means that we do not need to wait for a technology breakthrough or a legislation revolution. The CAV evolution is already well on the way. We can just relax and enjoy the ride as the CAVs drive around using artificial intelligence (AI) to become even more street smart.
Legislation about collecting and using road data to enhance traffic safety is ongoing in the United States (let’s not use “traffic light technology from the 1800s to manage traffic in 2023”), and in Australia a smart corridor is maximizing the flow of people, not vehicles. This includes making sure that the crossing has a green light when a bus departs from a bus stop across the street. The result is city traffic which is safer, more fuel-efficient, and healthier, as the incentive to walk, bike, or take the bus also increases.
In Germany, industry and university are working together to collect junction data to be compiled by an edge server, which then creates a model of the local surroundings to plan maneuvers for connected traffic participants. This is one of quite few good uses of edge technology and 5G networks for traffic safety: junctions, roundabouts, and other static city traffic scenarios. For most other cases, it is safer to avoid the additional delay implied by a central base station or access point, and it is safer to use locally processed decision data, but for city centers this is an excellent strategy. Finally, a technology in the right place, and not just an attempt to keep a safety-agnostic business model alive.
Finally, you will soon be boarding your—hopefully electric—airplane using a connected autonomous passenger boarding bridge!
In a hearing before members of the American Highway and Transit Subcommittee, the president and CEO of the ATA stated that the ATA believes automated trucks will be a tool that will help improve the efficiency of freight movement and help address a shortage of drivers, not replace them [1]. To this end, the ATA encourages a multimodal approach that prioritizes commercial motor vehicles, heavy specialty vehicles, trailer-combination vehicles, and passenger vehicles equally. The president and CEO further stated that safety gains are achievable by removing human error, which is a factor in 87% of large truck crashes and 94% of all vehicle crashes, and that automated and connected vehicle technology can work together to reduce or even eliminate these crashes. It is also possible to make meaningful advances in other important policy areas like reducing traffic congestion and emissions nationwide.
According to the ATA’s president and CEO:
“Far too often, when we reach barriers in the development of this safety technology, opponents will cite those barriers as a reason for why we should not have automated vehicle technologies rather than engaging in conversations with stakeholders as to how we can overcome these barriers and advance these meaningful and lifesaving efforts. Holding innovation hostage under the guise of safety considerations is an outdated, performative approach that may appease interest groups but certainly does not advance our common goal of zero highway fatalities.”
He further states that fears that all commercial driving jobs will be eliminated and that individuals will be left out of work are overblown and unsubstantiated. It is concluded that the ATA encourages the federal government’s approach on legislation to follow technological maturity and industry best practices to create performance-based standards that focus on objective testing and evaluation criteria for autonomous vehicles. In other words, requiring AVs to achieve an acceptable level of safety and performance, rather than requiring the use of specific technology.
In August 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission allowed Cruise and Waymo to operate autonomous vehicles across the city 24/7 and charge passengers for the ride. Cruise and Waymo already have driverless cars in San Francisco, but until now, their operations had been restricted. Cruise was allowed to charge for rides between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. but offered free rides at all other times. Waymo had only been allowed to charge for rides with a human safety driver within the vehicle.
Driverless cars have caused some people to worry. In July 2023, several antiautonomous vehicle activists in San Francisco placed traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo vehicles. The cone causes the vehicles to go into shutdown mode and turn their hazard lights on until the cone is removed or a company technician comes to reset the car’s system.
In response to the San Francisco Fire Department stating that they have logged some 50 incidents this year of autonomous vehicles interfering with emergency responders or obstructing access to fire stations, legislators have asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to collect more detailed data on the operations of the autonomous vehicles from Cruise and Waymo.
The CEO of Cruise commented that because autonomous vehicles are programmed to adhere to speed limits and other traffic rules, they are rarely involved in crashes that cause injury. The Cruise incidents reported during the recent months, i.e., activists placing orange cones on the car hoods to disable them, a Cruise vehicle that got stuck in wet cement, and the death of a man after a Cruise car allegedly obstructed an emergency vehicle, are not easy to cut down in frequency. The CEO further stated that because the Cruise autonomous vehicle fleet has hit five million driverless miles, “these rare events” happen.
The freight industry in Japan faces serious challenges of a driver shortage and an aging population. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications reported that currently, 45.2% of the drivers in the country’s transportation industry are aged 50 or older. In addition, new regulations are to be introduced, reducing the number of consecutive hours the drivers are allowed to work. Thereby, the amount of cargo that can be transported is expected to decrease.
To this end, the Japanese government is planning to launch a self-driving lane on some sections of the New Tomei Expressway that will allow commercial operation of fully autonomous trucks. TuSimple, which is developing an autonomous driving solution for long-haul heavy-duty trucks, has announced that they have begun Level 4 autonomous test runs on Japan’s most critical freight corridor, connecting the major cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka.
Further, TuSimple has completed a fully autonomous semitruck run on open public roads in China without a human in the vehicle and without human intervention. The test run was conducted on designated public roads approved by the Shanghai government, including Yangshan Deep-water Port Logistics Park and Donghai Bridge. Over the course of approximately 62 km, TuSimple China’s autonomous truck navigated through traffic signals, on-ramps, off-ramps, lane changes, emergency lane vehicles, partial lane closures, fog, and crosswinds.
The Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Integration Act has been introduced, which directs the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to establish a national program to use anonymized data from third-party entities to inform infrastructure planning decisions and to improve transportation management capabilities and efficiency on American highways. The bill calls out numerous potential uses for these data, including increased safety, congestion reduction, improved freight efficiency, swifter emergency response, and others.
According to U.S. Congressmen Garret Graves:
“We are using traffic light technology from the 1800s to manage traffic in 2023. Thankfully, our horses are now faster, and we’ve paved roads since then. Folks shouldn’t be sitting and waiting for the stop light when they are the only car at the signal. Traffic needs to be managed as a network—dynamically juggling freight and commuter demands so folks can get from Point A to Point B faster, safer, and more efficiently.”
The bill also requires the Secretary to implement security practices to maintain accuracy of the data and ensure that the data will remain anonymized by, e.g., prohibiting reidentification of user data after they are anonymized, prohibiting the collection of biometric and other identifying data and directly prohibiting government use of the data for any reason other than those expressly legislated.
Austrian tech firm Kapsch TrafficCom and the University of Melbourne have partnered to optimize a busy stretch of inner-city Melbourne road. The project pairs traffic sensors with advanced AI technology to improve the safety and flow of people, not cars, through the corridor. The reason is human error; if the smart corridor keeps many pedestrians who want to cross the street, waiting at a red light for a long time, the number of jaywalkers may go up significantly. Even more so if there is a bus departing from a bus stop across the street. Having a corridor that is focused on this multimodal use of road space, i.e., also considering bicycles, pedestrians, and public transport, can reduce overall fossil fuel emissions. In the long run, it may trigger a switch from driving to walking or cycling, which not only reduces emissions but can also improve individuals’ health and well-being. To detect people, the intelligent corridor integrates data from, e.g., specially installed sensors, closed-circuit TV (CCTV) footage, and Bluetooth signals from personal devices as well as data available on public transport. Machine learning-based image processing of CCTV footage helps the team identify not only the types of vehicles but also pedestrians and bicyclists. The image processing system also identifies “near misses,” evaluating safety risks and conflicts between modes of transport. The test corridor, which is a part of the Australian integrated multimodal ecosystem, thereby constitutes a living lab when evaluating the prioritization of different road users competing for the right of way at intersections.
A research project called LUKAS uses all the available information within the local environment to increase traffic efficiency and safety in future mixed-traffic scenarios found within urban traffic environments. This includes, for example, information from infrastructure sensors, connected cars and commercial vehicles, and mobile devices such as smartphones used by pedestrians or cyclists (see Figure 1). The idea is to collect anonymized local data from traffic participants and stationary objects, including values such as position, extent, and, possibly, the travel speed and direction of movement. The preprocessed sensor information is relayed to an edge server, which is directly connected to the 5G network near the junction or local area of interest (see Figure 2). A fusion algorithm on the edge server then creates a model of the local surroundings and uses this as the basis to plan maneuvers for connected traffic participants. Object information from the server’s environment model is fed back to the road users (see Figure 3). This expands their overview to include areas that they cannot detect themselves.
Figure 1 Information is collected from both automated and nonautomated road users in the local environment. (Courtesy: Bosch.)
Figure 2 A fusion algorithm on the edge server then creates a model of the local surroundings and uses this as the basis to plan maneuvers. (Courtesy: Bosch.)
Figure 3 Object information from the server’s environment model is fed back to the road users to expand their overview of the area. (Courtesy: Bosch.)
In the three-year research project, Bosch, InMach, IT-Designers, Mercedes-Benz, Nokia, Ulm University, and the University of Duisburg-Essen are researching how to improve traffic efficiency and safety in future mixed-traffic scenarios of urban traffic environments. Reliable communication between automated and nonautomated traffic participants as well as within the infrastructure plays a key role here. To run the tests, which took place in a public area in the suburb of Ulm-Lehr, the consortium used a pilot installation supported by the city of Ulm and operated by Ulm University. The selected area contains a junction with a right-of-way street turning off and a side street entering. The buildings there obscure the right of way, which makes the street situation challenging. The lampposts in the vicinity of the junction were equipped with video, lidar, and radar sensors to detect and classify the traffic flow. The information was then sent to the edge server via a 5G network from the partner Nokia. Due to data protection reasons, persons and vehicles are not identifiable. The edge server hosts the global environment model, several evaluated variations of cooperative maneuver planning, and a warning module for pedestrians and cyclists. To depict cooperative use cases in mixed traffic, Bosch, Mercedes-Benz, and Ulm University bring in connected, partially automated passenger cars. InMach provides a connected prototype of a street sweeper. Special smartphone apps from IT-Designers, GmbH, and Nokia make it possible to connect pedestrians and cyclists with the edge server. IT-Designers collects data using a video drone to assist in the simulation of the traffic scenarios, while the University of Duisburg-Essen supports the project with traffic flow simulations.
All tested use cases verified the benefits of the LUKAS approach in terms of increasing traffic efficiency and safety. The simulation results from AI-based planning algorithms lead researchers to expect a significant increase in traffic flow. The analyses by Mercedes-Benz show a significant reduction in fuel consumption and a decrease in the time required to pass through the junction in comparison to conventional driving. By delaying oncoming traffic to allow for cooperative behavior, participants passing stationary vehicles and vulnerable traffic participants crossing the road are protected in obscured areas. Thanks to the new technology and cooperative scenario planning, traffic participants recognize early on which driving strategy will enable them to behave safely and efficiently.
Munich Airport and Dabico have agreed to develop autonomous passenger boarding bridges. The two companies have signed a letter of intent and will start by determining the requirements for autonomous operation of the passenger boarding bridges before jointly developing a pilot system for Munich Airport. The aim is to reduce the duration of docking and undocking operations for passenger boarding bridges, thereby increasing operational reliability and efficiency.
Munich Airport has already made several initiatives to digitalize the airport to improve efficiency and passenger flow, e.g., biometric boarding pass checks, biometric access to gates and lounges, so-called “smart trolleys” for navigation, flight information and shopping offers, chatbots for passenger inquiries, self-checkout kiosks, self-order terminals in restaurants, sensor technology for calculating waiting times at security checkpoints, and robotic projects for ground-handling services as well as the use of robots for cleaning in Terminal 2 and the satellite.
[1] “ATA urges congress to establish national framework for automated vehicles,” ATA Press release, Washington, DC, USA, Sep. 13, 2023. [Online] . Available: https://www.trucking.org/news-insights/ata-urges-congress-establish-national-framework-automated-vehicles
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MVT.2023.3325506