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14 T he key technical challenge facing driverless cars is not the technology itself – that is pretty much already there, says Graham Smethurst, manager of the networked and automated driving programme at the BMW Group. This was demonstrated clearly at the Consumer Electronics Show in the US in January, where BMW showed two autonomous petrol-driven cars, a 2 Series and a 6 Series Gran Coupe, which drove themselves around a test track at speeds of up to 150 mph and were able to handle drifting in corners, a high-speed slalom course and precise lane changes. The technology in the cars combines active braking and steering with data from Lidar laser cameras, 360 0 radar, ultrasonic sensors and optical cameras that monitor the environment. Instead, says Smethurst, the technology challenge is very much about the infrastructure that driverless cars will use in everyday operation. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies are being developed to provide data to the vehicles, either from cars a few hundred metres in front or from roadside transmitters, and this is a vital capability for autonomous cars, he says, as it provides more time for an autonomous system to respond rather than relying on local sensors with a range of only a few metres. BMW already has its own communications network for its cars, which tracks the (anonymised) movement of every BMW across Europe, and Smethurst has detailed video footage to show this. He points out though that BMW is not unique here: other major car makers have similar systems, and one of them, for example, plans to offer a service where parcel couriers can find your car, open it and leave your delivery in the boot (trunk). So the challenge is for these car makers to collaborate, he says, as no one company can install and run networks right across the world. The standards here for frequencies and data packets have been defined, but they are slightly BMW’s manager of its autonomous vehicle programme tells Nick Flaherty about the challenges in this realm that lie ahead, and the plans to overcome them Spring 2015 | Unmanned Systems Technology Safety in numbers