Imagine yourself driving to Abu Dhabi International Airport on the motorway and an important delivery you had hoped would arrive before you left turns up at your front door at home.
Frustrating at the least. But, in the near future, such a scenario would be no cause for concern, according to Volker Bischoff, the Middle East general manager/vice president for the German multinational engineering and electronics company Robert Bosch.
“Your smart car will be connected to your smart home, and you can let the car drive itself while you speak to the delivery man and open the front door to allow him to deliver the package,” Mr Bischoff tells The National. (See video below)
And once at the airport, he says, there will no longer be the hassle of finding a parking spot.
“When you arrive, you exit your car at the entrance to the [airport] parking garage and the car autonomously proceeds inside and finds a spot completely by itself. This Automated Valet Parking function from Bosch is simply controlled through an app on your smartphone. This will reduce queues and issues with tight parking spots.”
Vision
While the robots have been gradually easing us from behind the steering wheel for a while now, how will a driverless car actually work for the average driver?
“Vehicle connectivity, coupled with innovative solutions for operating the vehicle, will create an entirely new driving experience in the coming years,” says Mr Bischoff.
“Bosch’s current test vehicles [on trial in the US, Germany and Japan] inform the driver when a stretch of the road is available for automated driving. Using a highly accurate map, the vehicle always knows where it is on the road. The car compares its sensor data in real-time with information stored in the HD map; for instance this could be road markings and crash barriers. To hand over driving tasks to the vehicle, the driver must press two buttons on the steering wheel simultaneously for several seconds. Then, on the central display, the road on the HD map turns blue when automated driving mode is activated. The display also shows the driver everything that the vehicle’s environment sensors can see, as well as how much time remains before the driver must once again take over the wheel.”
While the vision of a wonderful new transport world is nearing reality, there are still significant hurdles to overcome regarding driverless vehicles, not least the need for infrastructure that can support the technology.
“Automation is the biggest advancement in motor vehicles since the horseless carriage, and just as roads upgraded from dirt to pavement decades ago, our infrastructure must similarly evolve today,” says Kevin Curry, who is responsible for public sector global application sales for Infor, a US-based software multinational.
“Without public roads, bridges, and information systems that match the technological prowess of private sector inventions, autonomous vehicles will reach only a fraction of their true potential.”
Goals
The UAE may well become among the frontrunners regarding infrastructure, says Mr Bischoff. “This is of course very difficult to predict, but what I will say is that the population in the Gulf region is young and tech-savvy, and usually when something catches on here it spreads very fast.
“There are also ambitious goals in place, especially Dubai a Smart City, which means it might be faster than the average city in adapting the infrastructure to automated vehicles.”
If such infrastructure is in place, by gathering and analysing information from roads and vehicles, the rules of the road will adjust throughout the day, resulting in the smoothest, fastest and most efficient way to travel, says Mr Curry. “The integration of sensor technology and the enterprise resource management software that organise, manage, and monitor road repairs, bridges, signs, signal systems, repair facilities, and inspection programs, will bring the age of driverless cars to fruition by allowing citizens to benefit from the full potential of safety and convenience improvements they have to offer.”
Mr Bischoff adds that this region is maybe more open than others to adopting self-driving vehicles. “Generally the sentiment here is perhaps more positive than in the rest of the world,” he says. “The Gulf region loves its cars, and there are lots of straight, wide freeways where drivers who commute on a daily basis – for example between Dubai and Abu Dhabi – that could really benefit from the comfort and convenience of an automated car.”
He says there is huge market potential for connected and automated mobility. “A whole host of companies are working on these concepts around the world, and with Dubai’s Smart Driverless Mobility Strategy in place, we predict that the market will continue to grow. The global market for connected mobility is expected to grow by nearly 25 per cent annually between 2017 and 2021.”
Embryonic
But the potential for fully autonomous car sales is less than eye-popping, Dubai-based Tarik Taman, the general manager for India, Middle East & Africa at Infor, tells The National. “The market for driverless – ie fully autonomous vehicles – will remain a very small percentage – 1 to 2 per cent of total vehicle sales through 2025 with the overwhelming majority of these vehicles used for commercial use in controlled environments. The remaining autonomous vehicle sales will be for ride hailing service fleets.”
Despite this, Bosch, like others, has been investing heavily in the embryonic sector. “In 2015, Bosch raised R&D expenditure to €6.4 billion (Dh24.56bn), and for the past five years we have spent no less than 8.1 per cent of our sales revenue on R&D,” says Mr Bischoff. In 2015, sales revenue came in at €70.6bn. “Currently, there are almost 2,500 engineers working to further develop driver assistance systems and automated driving at Bosch. In 2016, Bosch will reach sales of €1bn for driver assistance technology.”
As with any emerging sector, cost and efficiency are paramount. Intel recently teamed up with the car-parts suppliers Mobileye and Delphi Automotive after they launched a collaboration to develop a low-cost system for self-driving vehicles that is slated to begin sales to car makers in 2019. Intel chips capable of processing 12 trillion operations per second will be inside the autonomous cars being designed by the two parts firms.
Safe
“This is really about the path to production,” Glen De Vos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering, told Bloomberg. “We’re shifting the focus away from just talking about the technology. The dialogue about automation is moving from, ‘Will it happen?’ to ‘When will it happen?’”
Volvo Car Group has begun delivering robot taxis to Uber Technologies, which are being tested in Pittsburgh as part of a US$300 million development deal. Ford, which has promised to sell 100,000 self-driving cars for ride hailing by 2021, invested $150m with China’s Baidu in Velodyne Lidar. Mobileye and Intel already have a partnership with BMW to field a self-driving car by 2021.
Adding Intel’s high-speed processors to the Delphi/Mobileye partnership will, they hope, allow the companies to develop a system robust enough to handle the rigours of everyday driving – without a driver behind the wheel. The cost of the system will be about $5,000 per car when it is introduced, but will probably drop rapidly as the technology becomes more widespread, Mr De Vos says.
But for the technology to be safe, the entire vehicle needs to be adapted to automation, from the powertrain to the brakes, steering, display instruments, navigation and sensors, as well as connectivity inside and outside the vehicle, says Mr Bischoff. “To ensure that the vehicle remains safe and stable in the event of failure of one of these components, redundancy needs to be built into the system.”
Other limitations of today’s technology come into play, says Mr Taman. For instance, “when vehicles are operating in snow-covered roads where lane markers become invisible to cameras making it difficult to keep vehicles in the lane. Similarly, when vehicles enter tunnels they can lose their connectivity to mapping applications.
“These limitations will be overcome, but it may take several years before they can reach a level of reliability needed to produce autonomous vehicles for widespread adoption of vehicles for consumers in all environments,” he says.
For Bosch, the vision does not stop with driverless cars, road haulage is also on the agenda.
“Truck drivers have tough jobs, working long hours and driving seemingly endless kilometres seated in a small cabin,” says Mr Bischoff. “We are working on connected technologies to take the strain off the drivers by basically functioning as copilots who can relieve the strain.
“We are looking at real-world cases where automated driving can offer the greatest benefits. One such thing is platooning, which involves multiple trucks traveling with 10 to 15 metres between them, all following a lead vehicle to which they are electronically connected and linked along a virtual longitudinal axis. The lead vehicle controls acceleration, brakes and steering for the follower trucks, ensuring that they keep a safe distance. Automated driving in the slipstream of the truck in front not only cuts fuel consumption by up to 10 percent, but also eases pressure on the driver as well as improves road safety.”
Depending on how it is configured, automated platooning is likely to take at least another five to 10 years to reach maturity, Mr Bischoff says.
This could also make the roads much safer, he adds.
“Bosch accident researchers estimate that, of all accidents caused by trucks involving physical injury, 90 per cent could be avoided in the future by using these systems.”
Road accidents are part and parcel of human-controlled driving today but when one happens involving a robot-driven car, the impact to public perception can be a serious problem.
Visionary
If a driver is not prepared to take over control of the vehicle immediately, “bad things can happen as evidenced in the recent crashes of Tesla Model S vehicles being operated in ‘autopilot’ mode”.
“This presents a public perception problem because the primary selling point of an autonomous vehicle is that the driver shouldn’t have to be fully engaged,” says Mr Taman. “Put another way, if the driver has to have both hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over control of the vehicle in a split second, they might as well be driving a non or semi-autonomous vehicle.”
However, in the UAE, Mr Bischoff says steps being taken in the driverless sector are providing a positive for public perception. “Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, has expressed a desire for 25 per cent of transportation in Dubai to be driverless by 2030, and this kind of visionary thinking will of course have an impact on public opinion,” he says.
“A couple of months ago, the RTA demonstrated a driverless 10-seater car in Downtown Dubai, which is a great way of educating the public about the technology and how we can benefit from connected and automated mobility in the UAE.”
Transformation
But aside from technical, perceptual and infrastructure challenges, legal considerations will primarily dictate the speed at which fully-autonomous driving becomes mainstream on the world’s roads.
“This is something that is more in the hands of … law makers, since they are the ones who need to pave the way for this technology in the vehicles and make decisions on whether automated driving is permissible within the nation’s laws,” Mr Bischoff says.
In the US, a few days of regulatory tussles were enough for Uber to pull its fleet of self-driving cars from the streets of San Francisco and send them instead to friendlier territory in Arizona.
The California department of motor vehicles banned Uber’s self-driving cars from San Francisco on Wednesday last week, just days after they first deployed. In response, Uber moved out. “Our cars departed for Arizona by truck,” Uber said. “We’ll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks.”
Mr Curry says a change of approach regarding the future of transport is required. “‘What can driverless cars do to comply with the government?” is the wrong question,” he says. “The governments must ask themselves, ‘what can we do for our future cars?’ and the sooner the better.
“Connected cars require a nation-wide transformation of our cities and we are nowhere near ready. It is time for our innovators, our contractors and our national leaders to start working together to bring technology across industries up to par.
“It is time to break down silos and embrace the synergistic future. It is time for us to get behind the wheel and steer change.”
chnelson@thenational.ae
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