With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle
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4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com
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With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars
is in full throttle
March 30
BY RICK MONTGOMERY
The Kansas City Star
To call Tim Sylvester a road builder misses the point. The streets he intends to build are
embedded with electronic sensors that may keep cars of the future from speeding, veering and
crashing.
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4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com
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NATE ESPY
A concrete slab from Integrated Roadways, founded by Tim Sylvester (center), was placed on
Interstate 35 near Gardner, Kan., during seam repair. The company is developing road sections armed with
sensors to monitor roadway stress and ice conditions. Coming generations couyld record traffic patterns, signal to
emergency crews when a wreck happens, and have interspaced “charging pads” that provide a jolt of power to electric
cars driving over them.The slab, which contains sensors, monitors roadway stress and ice conditions. In
the future, slabs will record traffic patterns and signal to emergency crews when a wreck occurs.
Some numbers to consider in the race to develop self-driving vehicles
91: Percentage of the nation’s 5.5 million car accidents caused by driver error
300,000: Miles logged by Google’s fleet of driverless cars without accident, as of last summer
37%: Share of U.S. car owners who said in a J.D. Power survey they would be “interested” in buying a fully
autonomous car
2020: Year that GM has said it hopes to market vehicles that can drive themselves
More News
Read more Front Page
A few blocks from Sylvester’s Integrated Roadways office in Kansas City, doctoral candidate
Amol Khedkar is toiling on his own prototype for a software system that would let cars talk to
one other, synchronizing their own movements. The vehicles could automatically change lanes
and make turns without humans mucking things up.
Khedkar had better put the pedal to the metal. He’s three years into his dissertation project —
www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 2/114/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com and in just that time, the worldwide race to develop so-called driverless vehicles has reached breakneck speeds. Much of the technology already is on the streets. Newer, higher-end automobiles can parallel- park themselves, creep through traffic jams on their own, alert drivers to blind side intruders, keep wheels from rolling onto centerlines and spot deer in the road before headlights can. Google and other innovators say they may be just five years away from having all the tools and know-how to market what researchers call “a fully autonomous vehicle” — where steering, braking and turns can be safely performed without manning the controls. The bandied-about term “driverless” doesn’t mean there’s nobody at the wheel, though some scenarios project that day will come. Driverless means nobody needs to be there because internal and external sensors, plus satellite magic, allow the vehicle to drive itself. The question has sped beyond whether or not technology will ever let motorists read a magazine en route to work — which techies say is a reality nearer than you think. Rather, society has begun to ask: Do we really want this? Computer engineer Don Wunsch voices an emphatic yes. “The days of human drivers deserve to be numbered,” said Wunsch, a professor at the Missouri University of Science & Technology in Rolla. “Humans are lousy drivers. It’s about time computers take over that job.” Others note that the rush to make autos fully autonomous, and conceivably far safer, promises to run into huge societal bumps. In a transportation center such as Kansas City, how many truckers won’t be needed in 2025? How will insurance companies react when hands-free accidents happen — and nobody disputes they will — or roadside sensors go awry? Will systems navigating 21st-century vehicles reach obsolescence and need costly upgrades every few years, like today’s smart phones? And, perhaps the most critical question, who will make certain these innovations will make travel less deadly? “You have these brand new capabilities coming to the market at a time of grossly inadequate funding” of federal safety regulators, said Clarence Ditlow of the Washington-based Center for Auto Safety, a watchdog group. Only after risky “experimentation on the road,” he said, will the public’s overall safety in a driverless world be known. Since 2011, three U.S. states where much of the corporate testing is taking place — California, Nevada and Florida — have enacted laws legalizing driverless vehicles. Michigan, Oklahoma and New Jersey have similar bills in the works. Nevada last year issued the first license and special plates for a self-driven car, requiring an www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 3/11
4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com operator at the wheel. All models in development have manual override systems to let humans take over. Still, in the absence of much political push-back against progress — and with corporate titan Google and virtually every car manufacturer around the globe leading the charge — a January headline in MotorTrend confidently trumpeted “The Beginning of the End of Driving.” The end is now for one Australian mining conglomerate, Rio Tinto Alcan. The company has ordered 150 autonomous trucks for its operations, saving more than $100,000 a year on each driver it needn’t employ. Human error Google reports that its fleet of self-driven cars has logged more than 300,000 miles of testing without the computer systems causing an accident. (The company recently has acknowledged difficulties, however, navigating the cars through snow.) Commuters in and around Mountain View, Calif., where Google is headquartered, are now accustomed to encountering Toyota Prius hybrids — mounted with “machine vision” cameras and emblazoned with Google stickers — seamlessly gliding through traffic. “They follow the rules of the road perfectly and change lanes with appropriate caution,” a blogger for Businessweek wrote last week. “They always signal. Thing is, the cars make the drivers around them worse,” because motorists will gawk, swerve close to check if anyone’s driving or take overly defensive measures to allow the robot cars through. Companies and scientists that promote computer-controlled driving note that human errors account for nine out of every 10 U.S. road fatalities. In their visions of fully autonomous traffic, fuel would be saved and fewer vehicles would clog the streets. Families with three cars might rely on just one — taking Mom to work and returning home without a driver so others in the household can use it. No single stroke of technology has powered the push toward self-driving cars. In fact, innovations dating back 20 or 30 years — cruise control, automatic breaking systems, GPS satellites — gradually gave rise to cars with their own minds. Two endeavors in Kansas City reflect the variety of approaches being taken to make driving smarter: • Khedkar, the UMKC graduate student, has developed a software program that he hopes will enable cars to continuously talk to each other when approaching intersections. Using remote- controlled model Ferraris he bought at Toys R Us, he intends to develop a working prototype by late summer. “The software is ready to go,” said Khedkar, a computer-science major. “We’re seeing now how the hardware responds to perform exactly what the software tells it to do.” www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 4/11
4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com On that front, Khedkar and his professor, Vijay Kumar, concede they’ve a hill to climb. But their ultimate fantasy features flocks of cars flowing, slowing down and turning corners in concert, each knowing what the other vehicles are thinking. “We don’t want, at the moment, to make a driverless car,” said Kumar. “We just want to solve the problem of the traffic light.” If all vehicles carried the software system of Khedkar’s dreams, traffic lights would be unnecessary. (“When I’m driving home late from a movie and stopped at a red light, waiting, and there’s nobody around? I hate that,” he said.) Intersections would be freed from human impulse and serendipity — “no ambiguity, no confusion” — as cars know and respect each other’s intentions. • Sylvester, the founder of Integrated Roadways, sees solutions in the pavement. He is developing pre-cast sections of road armed with sensors. For the time being, he said, the sensors would monitor roadway stress and ice conditions, and he’s already filled orders for the Kansas Department of Transportation for portions of Interstate 35. In Sylvester’s plans, coming generations of pavement would record traffic patterns, signal to emergency crews when a wreck happens, and have interspaced “charging pads” that provide a jolt of power to electric cars driving over them. The driverless age ultimately would allow these in-road sensors to communicate with cars, navigating them away from hazards. And Sylvester said that prospect needn’t cost consumers a fortune. “If we can increase safety...everyone deserves to have access,” he said. “Most of this technology has already been developed” and he foresees the software systems enabling cars to decipher roadway commands to be “something you could get at Best Buy for a couple hundred dollars.” Given that Kansas City is among the nation’s leaders in highway miles per capita, Sylvester’s startup could be positioned in the perfect place at the right time. He figures on tapping the area’s ultra-speed Google Fiber network to speed the data transmitted through pavement. Truckers first At present, vehicles manufactured with all the gizmos to run on their own would cost buyers between $150,000 and $350,000, analysts say. Long-haul trucking companies are more apt than individual consumers to respond to such price points, said Joshua Jacobs, a founding member of a think tank called the Conservative Future Project. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen next year. But I think things (favoring driverless trends) are moving more quickly than most people are giving credit for,” he said. “It might be a good idea for all of us to begin thinking about how we prepare for what we know is coming.” www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 5/11
4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com The nation’s 3.5 million professional truckers are starting to think about it. “Oh, I’m sure the larger motor carriers would love to fill their trucks with, well... nobody,” said Norita Taylor, a spokeswoman for the 150,000-member Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, based in Grain Valley. “The joke already among drivers is that (trucking firms) are trying to use what we call ‘steering- wheel holders’ as opposed to drivers who think of themselves as professionals,” she said. Ted Scott, director of engineering for American Trucking Associations, representing carrier companies, said “we’re starting to take a harder look” at the cost benefits of transitioning to autonomous vehicles for delivering long-distance freight. If the technologies were found to be safe, the potential benefits may prove irresistible, Scott noted: Companies could save on “ 401(k)s for an awful lot of drivers, pensions, the costs of training.” Goods could be delivered more quickly without the required rest periods for drivers. “But I would imagine some unions would have an issue with it,” he deadpanned. “The technology could be there in the next 10 years, but I don’t know if we the people can get there,” Scott said. “We know that technology can fail. It always does. So how do you minimize the impact of those failures?” A working group of the National Transportation Safety Board is analyzing the implications of hands-free driving. The insurance industry is on the case, too, with some insurers offering discounts to car owners who spend extra on today’s crash-avoidance features, said Russ Rader of the industry-funded Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Provided, that is, the features actually reduce wrecks. “I like paying attention to what I’m doing out there,” said Idaho trucker Jon Osburn, who last week was passing through town after a trip to Kentucky. “Who wants to be lulled into boredom behind the wheel?” A 2010 test run of a driverless Audi, winding up Pikes Peak in Colorado, offered an ironic lesson in safety. A manned helicopter filming the experiment crashed. Four of its occupants were injured. The car made it up the mountain just fine. To reach Rick Montgomery, call 816-234-4410 or email rmontgomery@kcstar.com. www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 6/11
4/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com
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p a l o o ka 6 2 • a day ago
I want a flying car like I was promised (more or less) many years ago.
2 • Reply • Share ›
o ca ta g o n palooka62 • 4 hours ago
The driverless car is the first step to flying cars.
0 • Reply • Share ›
p a u l m ckc • 2 days ago
Don't really care about reading a magazine while i drive, what i would really rather have is a
vehicle that gets 150 mpg, or one that runs on water.
1 • Reply • Share ›
o ca ta g o n paulmckc • 4 hours ago
Fancy a weekend in Colorado? How about going to bed in your car and waking up in
the Rockies the next morning?
If driverless cars are considerably safer than human drivers, then there needs to be less safety
equipment and less structural design, meaning cheaper, lighter cars, which means more mpg
www.kansascity.com/2013/03/30/4153506/fast-track-for-cars-without-drivers.html 7/114/1/13 With boost from KC, race to build driverless cars is in full throttle - KansasCity.com
equipment and less structural design, meaning cheaper, lighter cars, which means more mpg
(not to mention thousands of lives saved and hundreds of thousands of injuries prevented)
0 • Reply • Share ›
Jo h n a th a n N e a l s • 6 hours ago
What I see with regard to truck without drivers, is trucks without maintenance. If something is
beginning to fail mechanically the driver "feels" it. These "feeling" can be very subtle.
Sure, sensors could be placed in various positions, but I don't think they could ever replace the
sensitivity of a driver that has only driven that truck for a sustained period of time, and the constant
"eyeballing" that driver is giving that vehicle.
Something as simple as a fluid leak.
I don't look forward to the ramifications of parts failures, coupled with the potential of software issues
and failures of outside components (road sensors, etc.)
When that 80+ ton Goliath starts to waiver, it's not going to stop for anything but physics.I don't think
that is anywhere near as likely to happen with a driver on board.
0 • Reply • Share ›
o ca ta g o n Johnathan Neals • 4 hours ago
You've got a point here. Drivers know when something is wrong. I suspect driverless
cars will need more frequent and thorough safety inspections and test drives which will at least
be future employment for some current truck drivers.
0 • Reply • Share ›
M6 0 A1 • a day ago
Big Brother, thy name is Google.
0 • Reply • Share ›
o ca ta g o n M60A1 • 4 hours ago
Every major auto manufacturer is working on driverless cars - not just Google.
0 • Reply • Share ›
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