Biz, Military Gather To Talk Unmanned Vehicles

By Matt Roush

Imagine, only a few years from now, an Army truck that can drive itself through dangerous terrain, recognizing street signs and steering around obstacles. If the truck is hit by an IED, well, we lose only the truck and the cargo, not irreplaceable human beings.

Then a few years later, imagine getting into your car for a trip to Chicago, realizing you're behind on some reading you need to get done, and telling the car, "Drive me to Chicago by the fastest route."

A couple of hundred defense industry officials, automotive executives, government officials and academics are gathering at the Troy Marriott this week to talk about the future of cars and trucks that drive themselves.

The Autonomous Drive Connected Vehicle and Robotics Workshop is being hosted by the Great Lakes chapter of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

The conference started Tuesday with highly technical tutorials on the basics of autonomous and intelligent vehicles, and continued Wednesday with higher-level overviews of the autonomous vehicle state of the art. It concludes Thursday morning with presentations from the highest levels -- the White House Office of Science and Technology Program, General Motors, and the United States Army.

Two panels Wednesday afternoon covered autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles.

Connected vehicles, simply put, are cars and trucks that can talk to each other and the road. They use cell phone signals or other radio-based communications to warn each other of, for example, icy roads or traffic jams ahead.

Such systems can also be used to warn drivers of dangerous lane changes or tailgating.

Taking over, taking control away from the driver if the driver tries something stupid, blurs the line over into autonomous vehicles. From there, we go on to cars that are so smart they can read and react to road signs, follow a route, drive themselves.

The federal government even has a catchy name for these technologies, according to Walton Fehr, who works for the United States Department of Transportation with the rather unweildy title of program manager, systems engienering, intelligent transportation systems joint program office, research and innovative technology administration.

IntelliDrive is the name for a suite of technologies and applications that use wireless communications to provide connectivity.

The system could revolutionize driving, Fehr said. Estimates show that vehicle-to-vehicle communications could stop upwards of 80 percent of car-to-car crashes before they happen -- rear-end collisions, road departure, intersection and lane-change crashes. And vehicle-to-infrastructure communication could stop 15 percent fo other crashes.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication to avoid crashes will be the start, Fehr said, toward the goal of driverless vehicles.

Ralph Robinson,a research scientist with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and a former Ford executive, said today is "a fascinating time for engineers when we look at all the challenges we have ahead of us and the enabling technologies that will help us get there." He said the computerization of the car that began in the 1980s and the electrification of the car that's taking place today are both mileposts on the road to driverless vehicles.

In fact, Robinson said he believed the technological challenges to driverless vehicles could be solved within five to ten years. But, he said, the challenges of legal liability, customer acceptance and privacy concerns will take "much longer."

Tom Pilutti, a Ford Motor Co. technical leader in the driver assistance systems active safety department, said his idea of the ideal car is "a vehicle that leaves the driver as a pilot but assists the pilot when needed." He said challenges include delivering features customers will trust to use, and system robustness to cope with road conditions, traffic variations and environmental conditions. (In other words, the car's sensors still have to be able to drive the car in rain, snow and fog.)

And James A. Missener, executive director of the University of California Berkeley's California partners for Advanced Transit and Highways, spoke of a future in which the United States Army, the biggest fleet owner in the world, will sharply cut operating costs and increase safety with driverless vehciles.

One such vehicle on display came from Lockheed Martin. The SMSS vehcile is an unmanned small truck designed to carry backpacks, ammunition and heavier weapons for fast-moving infantry units of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps.

© MMX WWJ Radio, All Rights Reserved.