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It will take years of development and billions of dollars in technology, but self-driving cars are slowly headed toward becoming the dominant mode of transportation on highways, and southeast Ohio is being used as a proving ground to teach the vehicles how to navigate rural roads.
The state has conducted studies, but all the research done until recently gathered data on interstate highways, which are straight-line for the most part, with heavy and high-speed but predictable traffic patterns.
“In Ohio, 97 percent of highways are rural roads, but most of the studies have been done on urban freeways,” said Josh Every, director of advanced mobility for the Transportation Research Center. The TRC, in partnership with The Ohio State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation, received a $7.5 million federal grant to research the characteristics of rural roads in relation to the technology needed for self-driving vehicles to navigate them safely.
Every said the project, which is funded for four years, is primarily to gather data.
“We have trained safety operators to run the systems, to see how the systems perform on various roadway types,” he said. “Rural roadways vary more than urban road, and we want to see how that affects the overall systems.”
Modern vehicles are increasingly equipped with semi-autonomous systems - detectors using cameras and lasers that can see obstacles, even systems tied to braking that can automatically stop a car before it hits something - but ultimately the self-driving car will be a far more sophisticated piece of machinery, with sensors to match guidance with road configurations and conditions, even a connection system to know the locations of other vehicles and what they are doing.
In the meantime, the project in southeast Ohio is looking at how those systems perform on winding, narrow roads subject to sudden changes in weather, traction and visibility.
“In the long run, we’ll look at connectivity (how vehicles talk to each other and their ability to access data on the fly) but initially we want to know how the vehicle perception systems read the roadway, how they work in that specific context,” said Every.
The research, he said, will be conducted primarily in the Athens area, but the TRC believes the data gathered can be applied to any region with rural roads and seasonal climate changes.
“Athens is one of our focal areas, and we potentially may branch out from there. The area has that variety, with several types of roads and interchanges,” he said. “The four seasons in Ohio are very distinctive, from sunshine to winter, we can get those systems into all those different kinds of weather. It’s not just the road, it’s also the atmosphere and the environment.”
The vehicles gathering the data will look slightly odd, he said.
“If you’re operating nearby, you might see a vehicle that looks a little different,” he said.
Several auto manufacturers and transportation design firms are moving into the market, with a variety of systems. Uber, the ride-sharing company, Amazon, tech firms Apple and Alphabet (Google), as well as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Nissan, Ford, GM, Honda and numerous others, including collaborative efforts, are trying out an array of options.
Every said one of the primary benefits most hope will arise from the deployment of autonomous cars and trucks is safety.
“We’re gathering the data needed to develop safety standards, to create a provable safety benefit,” he said. “We want to accelerate and enable that, in all environments. In the U.S. we have 40,000 traffic fatalities a year and going up. We’re looking at potentially lifesaving technology. We want to bring that number down.”
The complexity of such systems seems difficult to imagine, but vehicles already have arrays of sensors and other devices that augment human control. For the people who service vehicles, it’s a constant effort to keep abreast.
Joseph Nutter is the auto-diesel program director at Washington State Community College. Autonomous vehicles are years away from becoming predominate, he said, but the service community is aware they are coming.
“We’ll eventually have to run courses, but that’s a ways off,” he said. “We spend a lot of time keeping up with new developments, there are more electronics all the time, and we emphasize that kind of training more and more.”
Nutter said just over 40 students are in the auto-diesel courses now, and 11 graduated in the spring cohort.
“They’re all working,” he said.
On Oct. 29, Gov. Mike DeWine issued an executive order reauthorizing Drive Ohio, which includes the TRC, as a statewide center for advancing “smart mobility solutions,” noting in his proclamation that 94 percent of the serious motor vehicles crashes in Ohio are caused by driver error.
Michael Kelly can be contacted at mkelly@mariettatimes.com.
Self-driving vehicles
Layers of autonomy:
• Level 0: Vehicle is entirely controlled by a human driver
• Level 1: Vehicle has some autonomous systems, such as cruise control or braking, that can be used one at a time.
• Level 2: Vehicle has at least two autonomous functions that can be used simultaneously but requires human control for safe operation.
• Level 3: The vehicle can safely manage critical functions under some conditions but requires human intervention when alerted.
• Level 4: The vehicle is fully autonomous under some driving conditions but not all.
• Level 5: The vehicle is completely able to drive itself under all conditions.
Source: Union of Concerned Scientists.