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14 M any current driverless vehicle projects are focused on driverless ‘pods’, says Professor Nick Reed, Academy Director at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in the UK, as opposed to adding autonomous operation to the advanced driver assist systems that are already in modern cars. There’s a separate development process for the pods, and the parameters of many recent projects has been influenced by the thought processes Google has been through with its driverless car project, he says. “Google’s experience was that people aren’t well equipped to perform the monitoring and fallback option,” he says. This was highlighted recently where drivers using Tesla’s Autopilot system have struggled to take back manual control of the vehicle after it has been in a self-driving mode. “So Google switched to developing vehicles that have no controls in them, and that operate in restricted areas. This means the incremental steps in the development are in the environment in which the vehicle can operate, rather than in the functions of the vehicle.” The autonomous functions are defined in levels by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), where levels 1 and 2 refer to driver assistance systems, and the driver must remain alert and attentive, while levels 3 to 5 describe increasing levels of automation in which the driver can attend to other activities while the vehicle is in control. “Companies such as Google are not going up through the SAE levels of automation; they are starting at the high level,” says Prof Reed. “I think we’ll see development of vehicles up through the SAE levels but we’ll also see the introduction of a spectrum of different vehicles across those levels. This is familiar territory, as we already have driverless pods at Heathrow that operate autonomously; developments now will see automated transport systems gradually operating in more complex and less segregated environments.” This has led to several trials of autonomous vehicles in the UK which were announced in 2015, including the GATEway trial at Greenwich in London that TRL is leading. This will operate autonomous shuttle vehicles in areas crowded with pedestrians. Driverless ambitions Dec 2015/Jan 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology The GATEway trial, which TRL is part of, will investigate the implications of introducing automated vehicles into the urban environment The UK’s Transport Research Laboratory’s Academy Director tells Nick Flaherty about the range of studies it’s conducting into autonomous vehicles