7 Ideas To Pave The Way For Autonomous Vehicles
This article original submitted on forbes.com
As more autonomous vehicles have taken to the roads, transportation expert Ben Pierce has been noticing ways the roads should prepare for them.
“They can drive themselves, but boy we can really help them,” said Pierce, the transportation technology lead for the engineering and architecture firm HDR.
In Chicago last week, Pierce suggested some big changes to infrastructure and some small changes to policies and procedures that can improve the performance of driverless cars and avoid some hazards.
“One of the things I’ve noticed here recently as more and more autonomous vehicles have started to arrive, is there’s a bunch of unforeseen consequences, and that we as highway designers need to start paying attention to those unforeseen consequences,” Pierce told a packed room Thursday at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council.
“There’s a lot of little things we can do to be ready, and if we get ready we can see these huge benefits and gains, and it’s phenomenal.”
1. Power And 2. Fiber
Many of Pierce’s suggestions require electricity and communications, so he recommends including conduit for power lines and fiber-optic cable in all new infrastructure:
“As we’re designing new systems, whether its a transit system, whether it’s a highway, whether it’s a bridge, you had better put conduit in for dedicated power and dedicated backhaul communications, and by that I mean fiber.”
3. Data-Collection Mechanisms
Connected driverless cars will be able to anticipate traffic conditions much better than we can today, assuming the data they generate is collected and shared. The second car can avoid a traffic jam only if it accesses data from the first car that reaches it.
“That only works if we’re actually collecting the data and doing something with it in real time. Right? So we have to have those mechanisms by which to collect that data and do something with it. That means we’re going to have to put microcells, or picocells if it’s cellular, or connected-vehicle radios or bluetooth beacons, or whatever the case may be—things on the side of the road so we can get that data in real time.”
4. Machine-Readable Signs
Early autonomous vehicles have taken on a challenge that future AVs may not have to face: they have to read the road the way humans do.
“The first generation of autonomous vehicles like the Teslas and like some of the other early models, they use optical cameras, dual optical cameras… and they look at things like the pavement markings and they’re picking out things with the cameras.”
Future autonomous vehicles could operate more effectively if road features are marked in ways they can perceive more easily. Take a “Keep Right” sign, for example. Current autonomous vehicles have to notice the sign and read the lettering the way humans do, but in the future:
“We could put a $2 bluetooth beacon on that sign that broadcasts out a message and the message would say, keep right. We just helped that car out, right? So while we don’t necessarily have to help the vehicles, there certainly is a lot of things that we can do to help the vehicles. So things on the side of the road like reference markers, whether they’re RFID, making our signage machine readable, because right now today signs are human readable they’re not machine readable.”
5. Machine-Readable Traffic Guards
Autonomous vehicles face a particular challenge when they encounter humans directing traffic in intersections.
“Humans, we’re used to hand gestures, and if you drive like me you get a lot of hand gestures. But we have to rethink how we direct traffic,” Pierce said.
A simple policy change could direct traffic guards to use signs in ways that will make it easier for AVs to read them.
6. Reinforced Pavement
Autonomous vehicles could have costly impacts on pavement, just because they do what they do so well.
“The cars will do exactly what you tell them to do,” Pierce said. “They will follow their programming and guess what? If you’re programming an autonomous vehicle in Detroit or elsewhere, what do you tell that vehicle to do? Stay in the middle of the lane. Seems logical, right? These cars are so good they can triangulate their position down to a half centimeter. That’s awesome. But they’ve all got the same programming, because who wants to be the programmer who tells a car, hey shade a little to the right? Nobody’s going to do that. They all travel in the exact middle of the lane, every single car.
“Now for those of you who don’t work in pavement design, what that means is, all the weight of every single vehicle will be essentially in two wheel tracks. We do not design highways to accommodate the weight of every single vehicle in two wheel tracks. Why? Because we as humans certainly don’t drive that way, we go all over the lane.”
To keep roads from rutting, transportation officials may have to build them from concrete or thicker asphalt, Pierce said.
“I don’t mean to be a downer, I really love autonomous vehicles, I’m a big fan. But we have to pay attention to what they’re going to do to our infrastructure. This is something that’s very relevant today, because I don’t care whether you believe autonomous vehicles are going to be here in five years, 10 years, 15 years or 20 years, we’re designing roads for 50 years.
“All this construction you see around town, that’s got a 30 year to 50 year life expectancy. So now is the time to futureproof that.”
7. Stripe The Asphalt ASAP
Often when transportation departments build and resurface roads, they wait before striping them, but autonomous vehicles depend on stripes to position themselves. They may simply stop when faced with an unstriped road.
“Put the stripes down after you put down the asphalt,” Pierce said. “It seems simple but I’d be willing to bet that 90 percent of DOTs and cities and states across the country don’t do that. They wait a day or two. And again if you’re that second autonomous vehicle, you’re good, but if you’re the first one, you’re in trouble.”