The University of Wisconsin-Madison held a display of autonomous vehicles at their Engineering campus November 17 and 18.
Wisconsin is a U.S. Department of Transportation designated AV Proving Grounds (WiscAV), one of 10 such efforts nationwide. WiscAV is a collaboration of industry, government and academia focused on research development and testing that aims to advance this form of transportation.
But, although these autonomous vehicles were available to view on campus and are operating in limited capacities, there is much more work to be done before we will see fully autonomous vehicles on the roads.
There are many barriers to fully autonomous vehicle operation: technology, public perception, public policy and legislation. “Public perception is a huge one,” said Jonathan Riehl, a transportation systems engineer in UW-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety Lab. “Technology is a little bit of a barrier, but it’s actually not the biggest barrier. [One of the things we’ve worked on is] talking to people about what they want to see in an autonomous vehicle, what safety things they want to see to be comfortable with them.”
Another issue is public policy. Currently, when a driver gets into a car accident, the driver (or their insurance) is responsible for paying for damages. If a self-driving vehicle gets into an accident, and there is no operator, who is responsible for paying for damages? Is it the manufacturer of the vehicle? The writer of the algorithm? The owner of the vehicle? These are issues that need to be addressed before there can be widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.
Further, there is legislation that needs to be addressed and revised to allow autonomous vehicles to even operate on the roads. Right now, each state decides their own legislation for these vehicles. Some states, such as Michigan, have very lenient laws and policies that allow for the testing of autonomous vehicles, while other states will not allow autonomous vehicles to operate at all. In Wisconsin, current policies require that all vehicles have a steering wheel—which was the standard when the code was written. But autonomous vehicles like the Navya bus have no steering wheel or pedals. Should this legislation be revised? What safety measures should be required? These are questions that WiscAV is currently working to answer through extensive simulations, testing and conversations with state legislative committees and general public.
That’s not to say that there will be no autonomous vehicles in operation in the near future. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) put out a classification system for autonomous vehicles that has become the adopted standard. Under this classification system, there are six levels:
- Levels zero: No Automation. These vehicles are completely user driven at all times.
- Level one: Driver Assistance. In certain driving modes, the car can take control of the steering wheel or the pedals. An example of a level one automation is adaptive cruise control or park assist.
- Level two: Partial Automation. In certain modes, these vehicles can take over both the pedals and the wheel. Tesla’s Autopilot is an example of level two automation.
- Level three: Conditional Automation. A level three vehicle would fully take over the driving responsibilities, under certain conditions, but the driver would retake control when the system asks for it. The vehicle is autonomous, but uses the driver as a fallback system.
- Level four: High Automation. A level four vehicle can drive itself under controlled circumstances, and it can ask for human assistance, but it will park itself and put its passengers in no danger if help is available. The Navya bus is considered a class four autonomous vehicle. It is autonomous, but currently still requires an operator on board.
- Level five: Full Automation. Full automation would mean the vehicle has full control of all times. It would require advanced artificial intelligence that would enable the vehicle to make decisions like a human driver in unfamiliar situations, even in unfamiliar situations.
“Some people say 95 percent of this is easy, and 5 percent of this is hard,” Riehl said. “That 5 percent is what gets you between level four and five. It has to be able to make a decision like a human would, on a road that it doesn’t know, and provide feedback into the system and network with other vehicles.”
So, some autonomous lower-level autonomous vehicles are already on the road, but it will take time for public perception, legislation and technology to advance and converge to the point where higher-level autonomous vehicles will be seen in widespread use.
“There’s a piece where we think there’s a lot of research needed to get to that level of confidence in people that these are going to operate well. So that’s our first step: get one of these here and do the testing,” Riehl said.
The UW-Madison College of Engineering is currently running simulations that allow them to virtually run autonomous vehicles hundreds of thousands of miles on the road to feed the algorithm. Once the vehicle is in operation with a pilot group on Madison campus, they can add information from that to further refine and improve the operation.
Building off of autonomous vehicles is the idea of connected vehicles. “That’s not as interesting or as big of a headline, but I think it’s as or more important to get autonomous vehicles to level five,” Riehl said.
Connected vehicles have the ability to send signals to each other to troubleshoot and avoid problems before the driver can even perceive them. For instance, if a car was driving fast enough that they were going to run a red light, and another car was at the intersection, the car running the red light could communicate to the car at the intersection, and the driver would know to slow down or stop even before they could even see the other vehicle.
“Without connected vehicles, you can only ever be as good as a human driver,” Riehl said. “If you want to be better than a human driver, we need to invest in connected vehicles. So I think what you’re going to see is convergence between autonomous and connected, and I think that’s what we at the university really want to get into is kind of driving that, and that’s why we wanted to be a proving grounds, to test all of these things.”
WiscAV plans to have another event this Spring where they will demonstrate the Navya bus around Capitol drive in Madison.
