You can move it back or further up. You can make it suburban or urban. We have many different road types, intersections. Basic principle is that you are able to repeat the testing in a consistent manner. What is your goal with all of this testing . Our goal is to help all of the corridors quarters in this industry. Who are some of the stakeholders . Who are involved in this research . A lot of stakeholders. You look into the Automotive Industry and you have your automobile manufacturers including chrysler and gm. You also have all of their tier ones and startups in the area. Withe communicators spoke the director of the university of michigans Mobility Transformation Center which runs them city. Which runs m city these cars do not coordinate with one another except that you look at the size of the car in front of you, the brake light and the turn signal. That is the only communication. But communication can be so much richer and more efficient if we start to have a communication opportunity. Saferc can become much and much more efficient. Congestion can be reduced. There are a lot of potentials. Essentially, cars are talking to cars. With what kind of equipment . It is just like a wifi. As a matter of fact, much of the fundamentals are the same. You put them in your car, but what if no one else does . Sometimes people look at this situation just like in the early days. No one wanted to purchase the first fax machine. No one to talk to. We are having this dilemma. No one wants to be the first one technology. This Everyone Wants to be a fast all the work but that is a problem. Whoeed leaders and someone is looking at the longterm rather than the shortterm to lead the effort. We took a test drive at m city to see how connected technology works. I am going to demonstrate from vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure. We have a forward collision warning. An emergency brake light gives a driver warning that the driver in front of you has slammed on their brakes. Panicked breaking. Braking. Because this is transmitting over the air and it transmits a minimum of 300 meters, that i car forfive vehicles i had. I will get a nice warning that i need to look out and potentially brake. Ready. Ok, brake. If someone ahead of you is panic braking. And what shows up in your rearview mere . Mirror . Icon morning you that someone is panic braking. This goes car to car. It is not like a sensor but more like a radio. Hold up one second. If you think of our radio, it is tuned to a specific channel. Our vehicle can communicate with one another. That is the protocol. Very much like wifi except it has a lot lower length and it is more secure. Can a third vehicle get into that communication . Absolutely. You want everyone equipped around you and transmitting. You are doing a threat assessment on the vehicle. You are calling this a threat assessment. To provide the driver a warning. For connected vehicles. You could get into where the vehicle took control. For instance, and this is way out there but if you are doing green intersectioning and we have a signal controller that is broadcasting the signal phase and timing. What color the light is for each lane and how long it will remain in that state. If you wanted to do a safety application, you would do red light violations. You tell the driver, you will not make the light so stop. If you are doing a sustainability application, you would talk to the 30 mile per hour driver. You are decreasing your carbon footprint. If you wanted to get into the automated world, who is the best person to determine who goes into the intersection. That is the signal controller but all of the vehicles need to be connected. It would take control or tell your vehicle to take control and guiding you through the intersection. If you ever see those futuristic renderings about how an intersection works and the vehicles are zooming through, that is what we will need. How far is this . A good question. Connected vehicles being on the road in large scale is still a few years away. Connected and automated are even a few years away. We are on this test track are these legitimate roadsigns . Yes, and it is a very good crosssection of roadsigns. They are not all brandnew. You will see some better faded or have graffiti. That is more along the lines of the automated side. If you have a vision system doing a detection on the sign type, they need to be able to figure out what the sign is. They cannot all be pristine. That is not how it is in the real world. I think we will go buy one that is absolutely horrible. Are the signs connected . Do they have any sensors . The signs do not but the end the intersections are putting up the infrastructure. They do have the signals but there are not the roadside signals. We plan to put in the Vehicle Infrastructure site. What will the next experiment the . Be . We are going to take you on the road and show you the roadside units. That is the infrastructure can. And the ice warning. We have sensors embedded in the road. Icy, ands snowing and when you drive by, you will get a warning saying that there is ice on the road. We have a roadside unit broadcasting it is that there is ice on the road. Every time i go by that location, we will get an ice warning. It is not quite a true demonstration but it is showing that i am communicating with the infrastructure. If you notice the two white boxes with the rabbit ear antenna on the road on the roof over there. They are the roadside units broadcasting the connected vehicle technology. This is part of the university of Michigan Transportation research institute. We use those a lot for testing and when we do installations. To make sure they operate properly before we send them out to the field. We also use them for demonstration purposes. That roadside unit is communicating information. It is telling us that there is ice on the road and a curve on baxter road. You have to install the technology into the road itself. There are different ways you can do that. You can gather information from the vehicles or a sensorbased system. Here is our ice warning. That is the ice warning. And you can see it in the warning. Geosensitive to the location. We are on a public road here. Correct. This curve on baxter road, we have it broadcasting that this speed limit is 19 miles per hour. That is so we can do a demonstration about a safe environment. We will get the warning. The curve warning where is the Sensor Installed . There is no sensor. It is the information from the roadside unit being broadcast to the car. There is an icon that will appear in the mirror that i am going to fast. Too fast. Just coming directly to this car. Correct. Do what i will you have been working in the Automotive Industry for a long time. How advanced is this technology that we are seeing . I think it is getting ready to go. Gm announced that they want to put this technology on their 2017 cadillac gts. It is ready to be deployed. The application that you can use , the basic applications have been developed including collision warning, red light violation. Other applications need a little more work. Detection, the bicycles, things like that. Roadwork on vulnerable users and on the sustainability and mobility applications. Other cars have sensors already including collision warning. You can replace the sensors with this technology to do the same type of thing. You can also use it to augment vehicles. O automotive we think that is important. Enabling technology to get Automated Vehicles to their top performance. Is this in any way connected to the Driverless Cars . That would be fully autonomous . That believe that it is in it is a technology so it can be used as a sensor. Another sensor for an Automated Vehicle. That we areink going to have Autonomous Vehicles in the sense that autonomous works on their own. Where we think they will be connected and automated. Necessarily, they are not autonomous because they talk to each other. I truly think that being connected to the infrastructure is very important in Automated Vehicles as well. My view is that it really safe way to deploy Automated Vehicles is using the equivalent of the hov lane and so they can get into the lane, the infrastructure is connected, they are talking to each other and the infrastructure and it really gives you a nice caret manning caravaning you can do. We learned more from the professor. What do you do here . I am a professor in the Mechanical Engineering department and the director of the Mobility Transformation Center. What is that . It is a Publicprivate Partnership focusing on the Research Development and the deployment of the connected and Automated Vehicle technology. What you mean by connected . What do you mean by connected . There are several ways to connect to the car including your cell phone, wifi, and bluetooth and that is what Many Companies are putting pushing for. We are focused on another technology dedicated short reach communication. The main reason we are pushing for a dedicated frequency and short reach communication is for safety purposes. If we have a different Communication Technology that is solely and not interfering by many other applications, safety of cars can be more guaranteed. In a world where we are very reliant on our cell phones, why not connect through the cell phone . Excellent question. They were designed not to have guaranteed communication. For example, and you pick up your cell phone and you try to dial a number, sometimes it you wonder why it is not responding immediately. The reason is that all of the communications are going through tower and through a the tower is covering a cell and is trying to connect to the correct tower. For this technology, it is a simple communication meaning we are not communicating with a tower. We directly talk to everybody. Using a short reach. For example, about 1000 feet radius. Everyone in this range will hear us immediately. There is no delay. And delay is very fatal. Imagine yourself driving on the highway. 6065 miles per hour. Roughly speaking, you are driving 1000 feet per second. If you delay that by one second, that is 100 feet. And we do not want that. Cars are talking to other cars. What kind of equipment . What does it look like . Simplest way to understand this is that it is just like a wifi. As a matter of fact, much of the fundamentals are the same. They follow a very similar sender. Is different from your athome wifi. Variationsll of the that we have refined over the years. This technology. It is similar. A differenting in channel. Think of it as a wifi. A if you are a driver in connected car, other connected cars around you what kinds of signals are you getting . Differentre 15 sets defined. The simplest one that we always use and we tested on every car is the socalled basic safety message. Literally, the safety message only tells everybody here is my position, my acceleration, my vehicle weight. That is basically it. If there is an important event like a heavy braking, you add that to the basic safety message sets. You are telling everyone i am here. Do not hit me. If there is a heavy braking incident, what happens . That if themagine car in front of you or the car in front of you but there is a heavy truck in between. You do not want to wait until you see the brake light. You do not want to see that the car is looming bigger. You want to start reacting sooner because it is a heavy braking. The message received from the following car would be the position and acceleration. And the system onboard can start to say that is going to be a threat and how heavy should i break or do i not should i brake or do i need to think about other actions like making a lane change. How advanced is this technology . Alle are making sure that of the Companies Agree on the same message that. About 1617ned for years. However, in terms of commercialization, we are just at the cusp of that. General motors Just Announced that they will have the equipment on their 2017 cadillac cts. That will be the first vehicle in the u. S. Theapan, toyota offered technology on two models. When you look a few years down the road, are we going to see a fundamental change in cars and their communication devices . Absolutely. We have witnessed the evolution of a very useful and powerful personal computers being connected by internet. They are now so much more useful. Many of ourine youngsters able to live a day without a connected commuter or a connected smartphone. Imagine now that we are at the same stage and we are trying to connect cars together. But the cars do not coordinate too much with one another except that you look at the size of the car in front of you, the brake light, the turn signal. That is he only communication. But communication can be so much richer and so much more efficient if we start to have a communication between two vehicles and between vehicles and Traffic Signals. Technology in the future will also be inserted into Traffic Signals, lanes . In france, i dont know if you are a way that aware of the that there is an many vehicles. Th 1600 the goals that talk to 19 intersections. What have you learned from your demonstration project here in ann arbor . Quite a bit. A lot of people worry when you instrument hundreds and thousands of cars. We had many volunteer their vehicles and the michigan bus system volunteered. People wondered whether you could actually put this system and start to broadcast the vehicle position with enough accuracy. Surprisingly,was roughly speaking, 80 of the is below gps accuracy 1. 5 meter. How do we choose this accuracy requirement . 1. 5 meters makes sure that you can differentiate the vehicles a lanen with half of lengths. Move with enough confidence that if you want to make a lane change. That is very important. That is one thing we learned. Ready, theys almost are not cheap yet. We are trying to make sure that they are cheap enough so that there will be a Quick Deployment , a large number. Have hasearning we helped us learn other things. First, we understand the traffic condition of the city very well. Cars,e we know 3 of the where they are, how fast they are driving 24 7. We learn a lot about the city. We also learned that this signal can be used to trend smart algorithms. In the past, not too many people are able to estimate the traffic flow accurately that we have toeloped technologies understand the traffic flow accurately with only 3 of the vehicles being instrumented. Knowing the traffic flow helped us direct or control the city traffic well even though we have not really started to program the Traffic Signals. The potential is there. We are able to control the Traffic Signals to respond to the traffic flow in realtime to reduce congestion. Timese mentioned a couple that this is pretty expensive technology. Who is funding Mobility Transformation Center . The center is a Publicprivate Partnership. What we tried to do is leverage the resources. University internal investment, about 10 million to get the center going. And now, we have 16 industrial members and a twotier structure. Together, we collect about 6 million in membership fees a year. We also try to work with our faculty members to write support fromget the department of transportation, the department of energy and others sources. It is an effort trying to get resources from any place we can get them. All of the Major Car Companies are partners in this . We are very fortunate that a livingof building laboratory, instruments instrumented a large number of vehicles, is getting a great deal of support. Honda,d, toyota, nissan, bmw these are the members. These are only six of the 16 members and we have many firsttier companies. That you arened also studying Autonomous Vehicles. How is the conductivity related to Autonomous Vehicles . Another excellent question. We think that todays autonomous primarily relyay on three kinds of sensors, camera, radar, and light. And gps and map. But now, the sensors are perfect. They none of the sensors are perfect. They all have their weakness and many are still very expensive. If you are able to use theunication to augment sensor system, you can do such a better job in terms of intercepting and localizing where you are and do a better control to enhance safety. I will give you three examples of how conductivity helps Autonomous Vehicles. First, we think that communication is a better sensor. The range of communication is about 1000 feet, many of the camera, and radar cannot see very clearly beyond 100 meters or 300 feet. Communication is at least three times longer range. Second, if there is a little kid who is standing behind a bus and he is going to walk from behind the bus. Or there is a car around the corner but your view is blocked by the building. In both cases, communication will help you perceive the driving condition better. So we say that communication is a better sensor than most of the onboard sensors you have. On Autonomous Vehicles. Communication provides you a power. , the ambulance for example can tell the traffic signal in front to change the. Ignal facing to red already. No one moved. Red. No one all move. So you can save lives there. They may be very smart. Google cars, tesla vehicles. Work onbasically the gritty little stuff. You only worry about your own safety. What is in your small region. When you coordinate with other vehicles, you can build a traffic system which is more safe, more efficient, and less congestion. Communication is like the internet. We can connect very smart cars together and build a Smart Transportation system. You mentioned lidar like radar almost but it uses laser. Laser uses a narrow spectrum of light and therefore it is very precise. Did tacked the reflection. You will not confuse that with sunlight or other light sources. This interviewg in september 2016. If someone went out to ford, gm, chrysler etc. And bought a topoftheline car, what kind of sensors, communication equipment, will they be getting on their car today . Vehicles you can buy with lower level of automation already. When i say lower level, i mean we have a society of automotive engineering defining the automation level. Level one would be a Adaptive Cruise control. You can already purchase that for more than a decade out. You can buy vehicles with lane keeping assist. And that would be lower level but if you combine them together it would be level two. Tesla autopilot is a level two Automated Vehicles. Not driverless or autonomous. Today, most of the cars that you can buy already they only use camera, radar augmented with ultrasonic. Works similar to radar but is even cheaper. , none of the vehicles you can buy on the market today use lidar. Is the vendor for the google car. Tea beama 64 lidar which costs 70,000. That is why they are not yet on your production vehicles. How many sensors with a card today have . Is it is there a number . When you say sensors cameras. Lane changers. Hundreds. For