This week the communicators goes to the university of michigan near detroit where Car Companies are using and it test site called mcity to tryout new technology. Carmakers art spearman did with technology that allows cars to talk to each other and talk to roads and traffic lights so there will be fewer traffic accidents. We spoke with a transportation analyst who studies this technology and with the director of the university of michigans Mobility Transformation Center. Host Debra Bezzina where are we right now . Guest we are at the university of michigan in what we call mcity. Mcity was built specifically to test, develop connected and Automated Vehicles. Host and this is a store in your background. Guest this is a storefront. Basically you can create different scenarios for connected and Automated Vehicles and trying to target the ones are difficult. You want to test and be able to repeat so when you are out on the street its hard to be able to repeat consistently so if youre behind us is the facade. He he can move that further back, for their upstate can make it either a suburban area or an urban area. We have many different road types come in many different intersections, many ways to part we have a pedestrian you can use but again the basic principle is that you are able to repeat the. Host what is your goal with all this testing testing is essentially fake city in fake roads . Guest our goal is really to help all the stakeholders in the industry have a facility that they can come in and the to commercialize connected and Automated Vehicles. Host who are some of the stakeholders . Who are some of the people involved in this research . Guest there are a lot of stakeholders. You look at the Automotive Industry and you have your automobile manufacturers so chrysler gm and although etc. And you also have all of their tier 1s. We have a lot of startups in the area so its huge. The communicators talked with peng at mcity. Hes the director of university of michigans Mobility Transformation Center which runs mcity. He is Research Safety and technology for 20 years. Guest these cars dont communicate much with each other except that you look at the size of the car in front of you, the brake lights and turn signal. Thats the only communication. Communication can be so much richer and so much more efficient. You can start to have a communication between vehicles in between vehicles and Traffic Signals. Traffic can become much safer and much more efficient. Congestion can be reduced with a lot of potentials. Host essentially cars are talking to other cars. What kind of equipment . Guest the simplest way to understand it is its just like wifi. As a matter of fact much of the fundamentals are the same. Host so you have this in your car but what if nobody else does . Guest sometimes people look at the situation just like in the early days. Nobody wanted to buy the first first machine. There was nobody else to talk to. We are having that dilemma. Indeed nobody wants to be the first one investing and nobody else to talk to. Everybody wants to be a follower but thats the problem. We need leaders. We need someone who is looking at the longterm rather than the shortterm to lead the effort. We took a test drive at mcity to see how connected technology works. Im going to demonstrate for you today vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure. We will start with vehicle to vehicle and it has emergency Electronic Brake lights and forward collision warning so the brake lights gives the driver warning that a vehicle ahead of it has stepped on the brake so panicked raking. Most sensorbased systems see the vehicle in front of you but thats the only information that they know so this because its transmitting over the air and it transmits a minimum of 300 meters that i can hear a car for five vehicles ahead so i would get a nice warning that i need to look out and potentially break. Ready for the ebl. Okay, break. If someone ahead of you is panic braking. Host what shows up in your rear view mirror . Guest this is like an icon that says break. Host is communicating directly car to car or is it going to wifi system . Guest this is direct car to car. Its not really a sensor. More like a radio. If you think of a radio is tuned to a channel so our vehicles communicate with each other and its called dedicated shortrange medication. Thats really the protocol. Its very much like wifi accepted if a lot lower and its a lot more secure. Host can a third vehicle get into the communication . Guest absolutely. What you want is everyone around you transmitting and you were doing their threat assessment of the vehicle and its really the vehicle in interest is the only one he would give a warning too. Host Debra Bezzina its a threat assessment. Guest its to provide the driver warning for connected vehicles. You could get into where the vehicle took control cell for instance and this is way out there but for instance youre in a green intersections so we have a signal comptroller that is broadcasting the signal phase and timing so what color the light light is for each of the lanes, how long it will remain in that state. If you wanted to do a safety application you would to red light violations they tell the driver you are not going to make the light. If you are doing a sustainability application you would do if you do 30 miles an hour driver you dont have to touch the brake and you have to touch the gas. Youre increasing your fuel economy and decreasing your Carbon Footprint if that if you wanted to get into the automated world, who is the best person to determine who goes in the intersection . Thats a signal comptroller but all the vehicles need to be connected so it would be taking control or telling your vehicle to take control and guiding you through the intersection. If you ever see those futuristic renderings of how an intersection works in the vehicles are zooming through thats really what you would see. Host how far away are we from that . Guest thats a good question. If i had a crystal ball id be able to tell you but connected vehicles being on the road in large scale is still a few years away so connected and automated are a few more years away. Host Debra Bezzina we are on the test track. Are these legitimate roadsigns . Guest yes and its a very good crosssection of roadsigns. They are not all brandnew. You will see some of them better faded or have graffiti and thats more along the lines of the automated site so if you have any type of vision system that is doing the detection on the sign type they need to be able to figure out if what sign that is and so they cant all be pristine. Thats not how it is out in the real world. Host guest i think we will go buy one that is absolutely horrible. Host are the signs connected . Do the signs have any sensors at all . Desk of the signs do not look our intersections in the work they are doing now is putting up the infrastructure part of the connected vehicle so they do have the signals up there but they dont have the roadside unit so thats the next step in mcity to put in the vehicle that is the structure site. Host what is our next experiment . Guest i think we are going to take you out on the road and shoyu a roadside unit so thats the infrastructure portion of it. Communicating with the infrastructure. If you notice theres two little boxes up on the roof of the tree, those are the units that are broadcasting the same technology in the Transportation Research institute and we used those a watch with testing and then we also use them for demonstration purposes so its broadcasting the message telling us that there is ice on the road up ahead and theres information along the curve. So you have to install the technology in their relatives house, correct . [inaudible] but we are on a public road right now. Correct. So this curve right here weve been broadcasting at 90 Miles Per Hour so we can do a demonstration of a safe environment. So we will get the warning on the left. Where is the Sensor Installed . It is being broadcast up ahead [inaudible] [inaudible] youve been working in the Auto Industry for a long time, how advanced would you say this technology is . I think its getting ready to go. Its ready to be deployed. I think the application that has been developed. Other applications need a little bit of work. So there is more work on the sustainability type of applications. [inaudible] debut. [inaudible] is this in any way connected to the driverless cars, the fully Autonomous Cars . We think that it is a technology that can be used as a sensor. We dont think we will have Autonomous Vehicles that work on their own. We think they will be connected and automated so they are not autonomous. I truly think that being connected to the infrastructure is important as well so my view is the safe ways using the equivalent of the lane so that they can get in if the infrastructure disconnected. They are talking to each other and it gives you a nice caravan in that you can do. We learned more about car technology. What do you do here at the university of michigan . Im the director of the new mobility transformation sector. And what is the Mobility Transformation Center . It is a partnership focusing on the Research Development and deployment of the Automated Vehicle technologies. When you say connected what do you mean by that . There are several ways to connect to a car. You can use your cell phone, and that is what many are pushing for but there is a new technology that we focused on. The main reason that we push for this is the meaningful safety purposes. So if we have a different Communication Technology that is not interfering with other applications, the safety of cars can be more guaranteed. In the world that we are reliant on our cell phones why not connect with the cell phone . Excellent question. They were designed not to have guaranteed communications. For example, when you pick up your cell phone to try to dial a number sometimes you wonder why its not responding immediately into the reason is all that communications are going through a tower and then it tried to connect with the correct tower of your target call. It is a simple peertopeer communication meaning we are not communicating with a tower, we talk with everybody. For example its about a thousand feet radius. Everybody within this range will hear us immediately. Theres no delay. A delay is very fatal. So imagine yourself driving on ththe highway 60, 65 Miles Per Hour. Essentially cars are talking to other cars. What is this dsr c. . It is just like wifi as a matter of fact much of the fundamentals are the same. It is a little bit different from your athome wifi. 2. 11 is similar but its operating in a different channel. If you are a driver in the connected car and others are around you, what signals are you getting, what is the activity . Theres like 15 different message sets. But the simplest one that we always use and be tested on every car is the socalled basic safety message. It only tells everybody else here is my position, thats basically it. If there is a unimportant events such as the heavy braking, you add that to the basic safety message sent. So we are telling everybody here dont hate me. If there is a heavy braking incident, what registers in the car, what happens . You can imagine if the car in front of you, or there is a heavy truck and between. You dont want to wait until you can see the brake lights or that it is looming bigger. You want to react sooner so the message received will be the position acceleration and they can start to say whether thats going to be a threat and how heavy should i break or do i need to start thinking about other actions such as may be making a change to. In terms of the standard making sure all the Companies Agree on the same message in the standards has happened for about 16, 17 years. However, in terms of the commercialization, we are just at the cusp of that. General motors Just Announced a day would have in 2017 so that would be the first vehicle in the u. S. In japan, there are two models. Professor, when you look two or three years down the road, are we going to see a fundamental change in cars and their Communications Devices . Absolutely. We have witnessed the evolution of a very useful and powerful personal computer being connected by the internet. They are now so much more useful. I cant imagine any of our youngsters that can live a day without a connected computer or smartphone. Imagine now we are at the same stage and these cars dont coordinate much with each other except you look at the size of the car in front of you, the brake light, the turn signal. Thats the only communication but communication can be more rich and efficient if we start to have a communication between vehicles and into signals. Succumb a technology in the future will also be inserted into the Traffic Signals etc. . Maybe you are aware of the fact not only we had at one point today is more like 1600 they talk to each other. What have you learned from your demonstration project here . We learned quite a bit. There are hundreds of thousands of units on cars and in fact a lot volunteered their vehicles. People wonder if they start to broadcast the position with enough accuracy. Roughly speaking it is 18 of the time. How do we choose this, 1. 5 meters makes sure that you can differentiate the position so whether you are on the left or the right with enough confidence whether you are trying to make a change. That is very important so that is one thing that we learned. We try to make sure that they are cheap enough so there will be a Quick Deployment in a large number of. First, we understand that traffic condition of the city very well because we know 3 of the cars where they are and how fast they are drivin driving ths epiphany for 7. So we learn a lot about the city and also that the signals can be used to train, for example in the past, not too many people are able to estimate the flow accurately, that we have developed technologies to understand the traffic flow accurately with only 3 being instrumented. Knowing the traffic flow will help us to direct or control the traffic even though we havent really started to program the Traffic Signals that the potential is there and we are able to control the Traffic Signals to respond to the traffic flow in real time to reduce congestion. You mentioned a couple times this pretty expensive technology. Who is funding the Mobility Transformation Center . Again it is a Publicprivate Partnership so what we tried to do is leverage the resources. They actually started the investment about 10 million to get the center going. And now we have 16 industrial members and we have together we collect about 6 million memberships every year and we also try to work with our faculty members to write proposals from the department of energy and other sources. So its an effort to try to get resources in any place we can get. So all the major Car Companies are partners in this development. Yes and we are very fortunate that our view of building a Living Laboratory and instrumenting a large number of vehicles in the infrastructure is getting very anxious with support and right now gm, ford, toyota, nissan, honda, bmw, these are only six of the 60 members and we have many first Tier Technology companies. You mentioned that you are also studying Autonomous Vehicles. How was the conductivity related . Another excellent question. We think that todays Autonomous Vehicles primarily rely on three kinds of things, camera, radar and also they rely on the gps maps of these are the primary sensors. Now they are perfect and all have their weakness. If you are able to augment to do such a better job in terms of perception that communication is about a thousand feet and many cannot see very clearly beyond the 300 feet so it is at least three times longer range. Second, there is a little kid standing behind a bus but hes going to walk from behind the bus or there where there is a d the corner. In both cases the communication to how you perceive the. The fire truck, the ambulance can tell the traffic signal to change to red from every direction so you can cross more quickly and that would save a life or two. Third is in the past they drive like personal computers. They may be very smart as they are getting smarter every day but its still basically the same you only worry about your own safety. When you coordinate with other vehicles you can build a system that is safer, more efficient and less congestion. So communication is like the internet. We can connect smart cars together and build a Smart Transportation system. It works like radar but it uses lasers. It has a narrow drum and therefore its very precise and you can detect and wont confuse it with sunlight or other light sources. We are taking the same december 2016. If somebody went to ford, gm and bought out a pretty topoftheline car, what kind of sensors, communication equipment will they be getting on their car today . Today you can buy vehicles with a lower level of automation already and we have a society defining the automation level. It would be a deficit cruise control. You can buy vehicles with lane keeping assist but if you combine both of them together is little to. Tesla autopilot is a level number two, not driverless or autonomous but a little too Automated Vehicle. Most of the cars only use camera, radar with a third type that is ultra