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Designing the Infrastructure for the Robots

By Mr. Richard Beaubien P.E., PTOE, RSP1 posted 03-28-2016 05:22 PM

  

As traffic engineers we take care to design our roads for all users.  When we are working in a complex urban environment, we must consider pedestrians, wheelchairs, vision impaired, bicycles, buses, and trucks.  When we add automated, connected, and self-driving vehicles to the mix the complexity becomes more complex.  That is why the profession is challenging and interesting.

The ITE workshop on connected and automated vehicles at the 2015 Annual meeting gave us a chance to explore some of these complexities.  One of our realizations was that it will take some time before all the vehicles are self-driving.  Meanwhile, in the complex urban environment, we must operate a system that has vehicles with a range of capabilities.  A talk by Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project, at a South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, March 11 reinforces the notion that driving in urban centers is the hardest type of driving.

“For many people, this isn’t a kind of idle curiosity.  There’s people with health conditions who are blind and can’t drive.  Epilepsy, cerebral palsy: all things that limit their ability to get around in the world today…

How quickly can we get this into those people’s hands?  And if you read the papers, you’re going to see that it’s maybe three years, maybe 30 years.  And I guess I’m here to tell you that I think honestly, it’s a bit of both………

So when we let human drivers loose on the road, normally we have this kind of graduated system where we either self-impose or our parents impose.  The same is going to be true with self-driving cars.  If you look at the way we develop vehicles, we started really driving on the freeways.  And we started here because it’s the easiest situation to drive in, because all the traffic’s going in the same direction.  It’s all moving about the same speed.  The road doesn’t really change shape quickly.

And then to move to driving on boulevards…. We have to add in cross-traffic and traffic lights, but it’s comparatively easy.  And then we moved into residential streets.  And here these look easy, but the stakes are high here because we live there.  And people are close to the road, and it matters.

And then we finally moved into driving in urban centers.  And here, everything is so compact, cars are coming from every which way, there’s all kinds of traffic with pedestrians and mixed interactions going on.  And this is the kind of the hardest type of driving…

So we when think about the technology rolling out over time, we imagine we’re going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive, and the technology might come there first.  And then once we have confidence with that, we’ll move to more and more challenging locations.” 

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