commercial vehicles.
The majority of vehicles in the pi-
lot deployment were equipped with a
broadcast-only “vehicle awareness de-
vice,” according to Debby Bezzina, UM-
TRI’s senior program manager. “These
are what we call ‘target vehicles;’ in
a nutshell, they transmit position,
speed, and heading. So they’re saying,
‘Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!’ 10
times a second.”
Approximately 400 vehicles were
equipped with devices that could
read these signals and react to them
with an audible tone. Automakers
including Ford, General Motors,
Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Mercedes-
Benz, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswa-
gen supplied 64 integrated vehicles
that reacted with audible, visible,
and tactile warnings. (None of these
cars had “self-driving” capabili-
ties—they merely alerted the driv-
er.) The two-year study resulted in
approximately 47 terabytes of data
from 27 million miles on the road;
this collection of information was
analyzed by an evaluator within the
U.S. DOT, and informed the U.S.
DOT’s August report.
Bezzina saw a flurry of industry ac-
tivity after that report’s release, as well
at the announcement by General Mo-
tors CEO Mary Barra that the company
would be offering advanced intelli-
gent and connected technology on
certain 2017 models. Yet Bezzina be-
lieves it will take years for sensors, V2I,
and V2V to all come together to make
“automated and connected” vehicles
that look a lot like Google’s vision of a
“driverless” car. Even when such cars
hit the road, she expects to see differ-
ences between the two visions.
“With the Google vehicle, everything is standalone; you’re not talking to other vehicles, you’re not talking to the infrastructure,” she says.
“But I think a fully automated vehicle
is also connected—first with sensors
and GPS, and then V2I communication, and then V2V communication
with the other vehicles in my lane. I
think that, in my lifetime, there will be
a special lane on the freeway that you
can only get in it if you’re in such a car.
And then you can take your hands off
the wheel and read the newspaper.”
Further Reading
Harding, J., Powell, G.R., Yoon, R., Fikentscher,
J., Doyle, C., Sade, D., Lukuc, M., Simons, J., and
Wang, J.
(2014, August). Vehicle-to-vehicle
communications: Readiness of V2V
technology for application. (Report No. DOT
HS 812 014). Washington, DC: National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration
http://1.usa.gov/1wYQ8TY
CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium
(European)
https://www.car-2-car.org
Intelligent Transportation Society of
America
http://www.itsa.org
Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration
http://www.safercar.gov/v2v/
University of Michigan Transportation
Research Institute
http://www.umtri.umich.edu
Safety Pilot Model Deployment program
http://www.its.dot.gov/safety_pilot/spmd.htm
Toyota Collaborative Safety Research
Center
http://www.toyota.com/csrc/
Tom Geller is an Oberlin, OH-based technology and
business writer.
© 2015 ACM 0001-0782/15/03 $15.00
technologies could work together. “I
think they’re very complementary. We
already have sophisticated radar and
camera systems so we can see the car
ahead of us. However, with V2V we
can also get information about other
cars, such as their driving speed, or if
they’re applying brakes; we don’t need
to observe it. And it would be great to
get information about traffic signals
as I approach them so I’ll know when
to stop, or how fast I should drive to
go through the next three signals
while they’re green. But for drivers,
I think it will be very seamless; they
won’t know whether it’s V2V, V2I, or
sensors that provide guidance.”
Not Driverless, but “Automated
and Connected”
One facility that is actively studying
all three is the University of Michigan
Transportation Research Institute
(UMTRI), which took the lead in a
recently completed $31-million gov-ernment-funded Connected Vehicle
Safety Pilot Model Deployment that
placed nearly 3,000 V2V-enabled vehicles on the streets of Ann Arbor, MI,
including nearly 2,600 private cars,
three passenger buses, and 19 other
1 Frequency of Target Crashes for IntelliDrive Safety Systems (DOT HS 811 381), October 2010
2 http://www.its.dot.gov/connected vehicle/connected vehicle research.htm - December 3, 2013
3 http://www.its.dot.gov/connected vehicle/connected vehicle research.htm - December 3, 2013
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