Autonomous cars coming soon

AUTONOMOUS vehicles could be driving themselves on Australian roads within as little as a decade, according to an expert in the field.

Dr Alberto Broggi, a professor of computer engineering at Italy’s University of Parma and CEO of spinoff company VisLab (Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory), told GoAuto that automated vehicles would be a “killer” development in Australia.

Speaking after his keynote speech at the second annual Australian Intelligent Transport Summit on the Gold Coast last week, Prof Broggi said Australia is the ideal proving ground for driverless vehicles, heavy commercial examples of which are already being tested in a limited capacity by mining companies.

While in Australia, Prof Broggi visited the CSIRO’s Brisbane base, which is working on specific applications of the technology for the mining industry and has developed a handful of working prototypes dubbed Bobcat.

“It’s definitely a very interesting application,” he said. “I’m really sure this type of development will fit the market. In fact, if they remain first, then that will be their target environment.”

Autonomous tractors are already working in European field trials, but Prof Broggi said manufacturers of mining machinery including Caterpillar, which now produces heavy trucks in Tullamarine, are hopeful of adopting the technology locally.

“We are working with Caterpillar,” he said. “They have a big interest in Australia, but they are active everywhere. They are telling us they are mainly interested in helping the drivers by whatever means.

“People who are running the mines are interested in automation, but right now we are only active in the agricultural domain – tractors in the field with limited automation.

“You have to stay on the tractor, taking care of moving around. You are always in charge, taking care not to hit cows, but the next step will be full automation. Right now there is no one using this in mining.”

Left: Autonomous-drive Volkswagen Passat wagon. Below: Autonomous van undergoes tests.

Prof Broggi, a pioneer of machine vision applied to driverless cars and unmanned vehicles, said the main motivation for mining companies when it comes to automated vehicles is safety, although efficiency was also a key factor.

“Safety is the biggest advantage, but also cost and efficiency. If you are talking about tractors, efficiency plays a huge role if you can have your tractor going in the field 24/7. If you talk about mining and automotive then safety is the driving factor because it is a big occupational issue.”

In addition to its contract with Caterpillar and a range of agricultural companies, VisLab also works with the US military and a company that supplies small automated vehicles for factories.

Prof Broggi said he also visited his counterparts at Griffith University, which is developing automated vehicle control systems for small passenger city-cars travelling at low speeds on a set urban course.

Car-makers have experimented with driverless vehicles on closed test tracks for more than 30 years, but one of the first autonomous vehicle tests on public roads was carried out by a group in Munich in 1996, before another dubbed ‘No hands across America’ was conducted in the US.

Soon after, Prof Broggi’s group – which has been developing driverless vehicles since 1998, including the ARGO prototype, the TerraMax entry at the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, and BRAiVE – successfully completed a 2000km trek across Italy in fully automated vehicles employing just cameras and low-cost sensors.

“These are the three milestones. Everything developed from that. In the late ’90s there were not many people working on it because it was still not felt as an interesting thing. Then everything flourished again, and there were so many groups around the world looking at autonomous vehicles.”

Volkswagen, BMW, Honda and Toyota continue to develop autonomous vehicle technologies, but two of the highest-profile public-road driverless vehicle tests are currently being conducted in Germany, including a Volkswagen Passat wagon developed over four years at a cost of more than half a million dollars by Berlin’s Free UniversityThe car is driven by a computer that steers, starts and stops the vehicle according to data received from a stereo camera, GPS system, odometer and laser scanners mounted on the roof and bumpers to monitor the road, pedestrians, buildings, surrounding traffic, trees and even traffic lights up to 70 metres away, and then react accordingly.

Several other groups are working on similar technology, including Google, which has been testing a robotised Toyota Prius in Nevada, while BMW recently announced that a 5 Series sedan fitted with its Automated Vehicle Technology has notched up almost 5000km in testing, partly on the A9 Motorway between Munich and Nuremberg.

“It is very risky and just a few car-makers are working on it – really working on it – but for many it is too far away,” said Dr Broggi. “Most of them are also working on EVs and a lot of other projects, but only a few are working on – or at least telling the world they are working on – autonomous cars.”

While BMW has been keen to publicise its autonomous vehicle development, Dr Broggi said Japan and the US are the primary centres for investment in driverless vehicle technologies, but Australia could play a greater role.

“Definitely other countries are more advanced like Japan and the US. They are investing heavily. If you don’t, it will not bring you to any product soon. People are more working on it in the US and bringing it here, but it would be a killer technology in a country like Australia, because you have so many big vehicles moving around mines in difficult situations.

“The Caterpillar guys are flying in trained people from the US to here, just to work with the vehicles for 16 to 17 hours a day and then fly back. These are very expensive people because they are so highly trained in these vehicles the size of houses. If the technology was more widespread the need for that would be more limited.

“I’d really love to test here, because here you have one of the most important mining industries.”

Estimates for when automated vehicles will become available to the public range between 10 and 40 years, but Prof Broggi says legal issues – chiefly, will the driver or manufacturer be responsible if there is an accident? – could be the deciding factor.

“That is one of the biggest problems. The driver has to be there for legal reasons. Someone has to take responsibility. It’s a legal problem. The European Commission is investing quite a bit of money into investigating legal and psychological aspects.”

Both VW and BMW needed special permission to conduct tests (with a back-up driver behind the wheel of their specially outfitted Passat and 5 Series prototypes) on public roads.

The 5 Series combines BMW’s widely available Adaptive Cruise Control technology with emergency stop assist and BMW TrackTrainer, a system used by BMW driver training schools to teach students the correct racing line around a racetrack.

Now in its second generation, TrackTrainer first guided an automated BMW around the North Loop of the Nurburgring in October 2009, before performing a similar feat at California’s Laguna Seca Raceway in May this year, “demonstrating that fast and dynamic automated driving is indeed possible”.

The prototype was developed under the Highly Automated Driving project at BMW Group Research and Technology, as part of the German government’s SmartSenior Initiative launched in May 2009, but BMW says it continues to develop driver assistance functions for its future vehicles.

As fitted to BMW’s i3 concept, they include Parking Assistant, which is similar to the automated parking functions now available on many cars, and Traffic Jam Assistant, which takes control of the vehicle in highly congested traffic, allowing it to “go with the flow” at speeds of up to 40km/h while its driver relaxes – as long as one hand remains on the steering wheel.

“The next thing we want to ‘teach’ our prototype is how to deal with road construction sites and motorway junctions,” said BMW’s project manager Nico Kampchen.

“Construction sites are a big challenge because they take on all kinds of forms, which makes detection, localisation and determining the right vehicle response quite difficult.”

While many automated vehicle systems are predictive and rely on digital maps and precise satellite positioning systems to remain within a lane, for example, Prof Broggi’s research focuses on reactive technologies that ‘read’ the road and combine with real-time data on roadworks, crash sites and the like to plan the best route.

To prove the approach, Prof Broggi’s team successfully completed the first intercontinental driverless journey, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge – a 13,000km cross-country trek from Italy to China from July 26 to October 28 last year.

The experiment aimed to test autonomous vehicle operations in uncontrolled environments with varying geographic, traffic, weather and infrastructure conditions for an extended period to determine and rectify inconsistent behaviours without maps or GPS coverage.

With no advance testing of the route, the VisLab team successfully ‘drove’ a fleet of four small electric vans – each fitted with seven cameras, four laser-scanners and vehicle-to-vehicle radios – using a variety of systems, including waypoint following, leader-follower, stop-and-go, vehicle detection, lane detection, pedestrian detection, ditch and berm detection, panoramic viewing, terrain mapping and slope estimation.

“If you have a map, it’s no problem. But when it comes to off-road driving, you can’t rely on every single detail on the things in maps because things change – roots grow and tracks disappear.

“GPS can position and time the changing of every single traffic light. It is successful and it works, and maybe one day every single street will be mapped, but we’re more reactive to the world, rather than always relying on a map.

“Vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is very important because if you have some exchange between vehicles and a central point, it has enormous advantages, but it’s a little biased. My work is in perception – understanding the environment.”

Prof Broggi said that, while many autonomous vehicles rely on expensive and invasive sensors, the VisLab approach involved relatively inexpensive but highly integrated sensors, which in this case gathered 20,000 hours of data that will be shared with VisLab’s partners.

He said the data would be invaluable for the next two to three years of research, which will focus on fine-tuning a range of problems, such as operation in highly congested and/or chaotic traffic, and visibility in heavy rain or dust.

Like all new technologies, Prof Broggi said vehicle autonomy will be expensive initially and is therefore likely to first appear in high-cost luxury vehicles.

“For sure you will see it in luxury cars, because it will be highly expensive at first, but it’s not very far away. Maybe in five years we’ll have an autonomous car on the highway – down-town maybe 15 years. The car was invented more than 100 years ago, but computer technology is advancing rapidly.”

Prof Broggi said highways would be the first place autonomous vehicles will be seen.

“You press your autonomous button and when you want to exit you take control. You’ll not be able to overtake a vehicle, but you can follow a vehicle in front, keep a safe distance and follow a lane. It’s already there.”

Given the fact most accidents are caused by human error, most experts agree that computer-controlled vehicles will inevitably reduce the road toll. Driverless vehicles will also be ideally suited to car-pooling, but Prof Broggi says that will not necessarily mean that being behind the wheel will be a fun-free zone.

“Whenever you have this technology, you can use it for so many different things – autonomous taxis, people who don’t have mobility. There’s a huge market.

“You can always drive your car, but when you drive your car every day to work in traffic, you’re not really a car enthusiast. But on Sundays, you will be driving your car that’s fine.

“I don’t think they’ll be mandatory. I don’t know. If someone sees that we are really much safer, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all have automated cars – maybe in 20 to 50 years.

“If it’s really demonstrated that these are safer, then it could be compulsory to have automation in some urban areas or highways. You will have specific areas where you can ‘drive’.

“Technology is progressing. Autonomous cars might not be everywhere in 20 years, but in 50 years, who knows?“There’s a whole community working continually on autonomous cars. It might not be readily exploitable in the next five years, but one way or another one day we will have to work with autonomous cars.”