Recognizing and Addressing Safety

When the ITS program in the U.S. was first conceived by Mobility 2000 more than 10 years ago, it had four primary functional areas: advanced traffic management systems, advanced traveler information systems, commercial vehicle operations and advanced vehicle control systems. In the decade since then, the majority of the attention of the ITS community in general has been focused on ATMS and ATIS, while the definition of AVCS has been expanded to AVCSS with the addition of "and Safety" to accommodate safety warning systems that are not actually control systems.

There is a tendency in many quarters to assume that the shape and resource allocations of the U.S. DOT’s ITS program reflect or maybe even determine the scope of all ITS activities within the U.S. This assumption is particularly misleading in the case of AVCSS, where the large majority of the activity occurs within the vehicle manufacturing and supplier industries and the most advanced thinking happens within the state DOTs rather than the U.S. DOT. The investments that industry has made in researching and developing AVCSS products far exceed the investments by the government.

AVCSS encompasses a remarkably wide range of user services and technologies. These are normally defined according to the categories contained in the U.S. National ITS Architecture (longitudinal collision avoidance, lateral collision avoidance, vision enhancement, safety readiness, pre-crash restraint deployment and automated vehicle operation). However, this does not even capture the breadth of possibilities that arise from varying levels of cooperation and automation within an individual user service.

Warning systems can provide audible, visible or haptic (touch) cues to alert the driver to potentially unsafe conditions, after which the driver needs to take corrective action to avoid the hazard. Forward collision warnings have been available on trucks for several years, primarily from Eaton-Vorad, and truck lane departure warning systems have been announced by Iteris and AssistWare. Short-range warnings of parking hazards also have been available for passenger cars for several years.

Control assistance systems provide automatic control of a portion of the driving function to assist the driver by relieving workload (e.g., adaptive cruise control) or to enhance safety (e.g., collision avoidance braking). Adaptive cruise control has recently become available on a few high-end cars in the U.S. (Mercedes S-class, Lexus LS-430 and soon the new Infiniti Q45), as well as on some trucks. It has been available on a wider range of vehicles and for some time in Japan and Europe.

Full automation systems provide completely automated driving, relieving the driver of responsibility for driving or making it possible for vehicles to operate without drivers. These have not yet been introduced in public road applications, but they are carrying millions of passengers every day in airport people movers and a variety of urban transit systems (Vancouver, Paris, London, Tokyo, Lyon and Lille). Automated, driverless vehicles also are moving goods every day in factories and some major ports, such as Rotterdam.

Degree of cooperation refers to the amount of information that is exchanged between vehicle and roadside devices and among separate vehicles in order to enhance safety and performance. Autonomous vehicles employ no cooperation, but derive all their information about the environment from their own on-board sensors. Although they can "see" other vehicles, they cannot "talk to," "listen to" or even signal those other vehicles.

The U.S. DOT Intelligent Vehicle Initiative has focused almost all of its attention on the autonomous vehicle. IVI has sponsored one small project to explore the possibilities of cooperative warning systems in the form of "sensor friendly vehicle and roadway systems."

This project has considered concepts for both passive and active "tagging" of vehicles and roadside objects so that they can be more clearly identifiable by automotive radars, as well as technologies such as modulation of infrared LED taillights for vehicle-vehicle communications and fluorescent paint striping on road surfaces to facilitate discrimination of lane position information. The basic concept behind this project is that a modest application of technology to "target" vehicles and the roadway infrastructure can significantly enhance the performance and/or reduce the cost and complexity of the in-vehicle AVCSS sensing and warning systems.

For example, the CHAUFFEUR project in Europe uses a distinctive pattern of infrared lights on the back of a trailer as the "target" for the following truck to follow to form an "electronic towbar," and the two trucks also communicate with each other using a wireless link.

The states of California, Minnesota and Virginia have joined together in the "IVI Infrastructure Consortium" to expand the IVI into infrastructure-cooperative systems. Their initial focus is on intersection collision warning, which is impractical for autonomous vehicle systems and almost certainly requires infrastructure-based sensing and communication systems. Substantial attention also has been given to infrastructure cooperation with AVCSS in the "Smartway" project of Japan’s Ministry of Construction. They demonstrated their initial concepts and devices in late November 2000 as part of Demo 2000 (see ITS World, Jan/Feb 2001, p 18).

The larger field of cooperative vehicle-highway automation systems (CVHAS) is the subject of a newer multi-state pooled fund research project led by California, and already joined by 10 other states. This project is exploring both the technical and non-technical issues that need to be addressed to provide a broad range of levels of automation and cooperation in AVCSS, leading toward a future automated highway system. The higher levels of cooperation among vehicles and between vehicles and the infrastructure provide the in-vehicle systems with more accurate and reliable information, making higher levels of performance and automation achievable.

The initial work of the CVHAS project is a set of case studies of the potential for bus and truck automation systems to meet real needs in specific locations in the member states.

The results of these studies will be shown at Demo 2002, a major demonstration of bus and truck automation to be held in San Diego in the late summer of 2002.

In the meantime, the CVHAS project partners are soliciting participation by private sector and international organizations interested in exploiting the full potential of AVCSS to contribute toward reducing congestion and improving traffic safety.