Crash-Testing Driverless Cars in a Robot City
A Michigan mini-metropolis will put driverless cars
through their paces
by Keith Naughton and Jeffrey Green
4:00 AM PDT April 2, 2015
A mother pushing a baby carriage jaywalks across a busy
city street. Cutting between two parked cars and partially obscured by a bus,
she edges her stroller into traffic before freezing as a speeding car bears
down on her. Will the car stop in time? Or will it mow down mother and child?
It doesn’t really matter: The mom is a robot, and the car is a driverless
vehicle cruising down a fake street in a mock town.
Welcome to M City, a soon-to-open 23-acre mini-metropolis
at the University of Michigan, where automakers can test autonomous cars to
prepare for the driverless future expected within a decade. Seeking to
replicate a modern city’s chaos—traffic jams, unpredictable pedestrians,
weaving cyclists—M City starts running on July 20 and has carmakers and tech
companies queuing up to conduct research on its roads.
“We’ve been inundated with requests for visits and
demonstrations,” says Peter Sweatman, who oversees M City, a collaboration
between the university’s Transportation Research Institute, the Michigan
Department of Transportation, and big automakers including Ford Motor, General
Motors, and Toyota Motor.
Until now, tests of autonomous cars have been conducted
on public roads or private proving grounds. Google’s self-driving Toyota
Priuses, equipped with laser radar saucers on their roofs, are a common sight
in Silicon Valley. Other automakers study robot cars on old test tracks
designed to evaluate how fast new models can run laps or how well they handle
with humans at the wheel. But such testing doesn’t provide a controlled
environment to evaluate how autonomous cars cope with the vagaries of everyday
driving.
M City sits amid towering pines in the Detroit suburb of
Ann Arbor, a short hop from the technology labs of multiple carmakers. Once
completed this summer, the $6.5 million facility will be outfitted with 40
building facades, angled intersections, a traffic circle, a bridge, a tunnel,
gravel roads, and plenty of obstructed views. There’s even a four-lane highway
with entrance and exit ramps to test how cars without a driver would merge.
“Mechatronic pedestrians” who occasionally pop out into
traffic will provide a critical—and bloodless—measure of whether sensors and
automatic brakes can react in time to avoid running down a real person. As in a
Hollywood backlot, building facades can be rearranged to add to the chaos
confronting the chip-controlled vehicles.
Eventually, hundreds of robot cars will ply M City’s
urban byways in all seasons and weather conditions. “We would never do any
dangerous or risky tests on the open road, so this will be a good place to test
some of the next technology,” says Hideki Hada, general manager for electronic
systems at Toyota’s Technical Center in Ann Arbor. “A big challenge is
intersections in the city, because there are vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles
together with complex backgrounds with buildings and connections to
infrastructure. That’s why this is really important.”
Self-driving cars that move in harmony by sensing one
another and the environment are expected to one day ease congestion and improve
road safety. With the majority of people expected to move to megacities
globally in the next 25 years, chip-controlled robo taxis could drive closer
together, carrying more people in fewer vehicles. The cars will also let
commuters multitask while traveling, boosting productivity.
The market for driverless technology—everything from
collision-avoidance sensors to microchips capable of processing life-or-death
decisions in a millisecond—will grow to $42 billion annually by 2025, and
self-driving cars may account for a quarter of global auto sales by 2035,
according to Boston Consulting Group. That helps explain why Ford, GM, and
Toyota, as well as Honda Motor and Nissan Motor, are lending their technical
expertise to M City. It’s also why tech giants Apple and Google are developing
their own driverless cars.
In coming years, federal, state, and city officials will
have to decide how roadways should be designed, lighted, and controlled in a
world with self-driving cars. Will road signs and traffic lights be necessary?
What happens in a power failure? The search for answers is what led the
Michigan Department of Transportation to pay $3 million of M City’s
construction costs. The university picked up the rest.
Audi’s driverless A7 concept model, shown at the 2015
Consumer Electronics Show, will likely be tested on M City’s streets.
Automakers aren’t waiting for all the results. Tesla
Motors plans to offer a self-steering version of its Model S sedan this summer,
and GM says it will introduce hands-free highway driving technology on a
Cadillac in two years. The first totally self-driving vehicles will likely
arrive on public roadways within five years, Ford Chief Executive Officer Mark
Fields said in January.
Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz already sells a system that can
pilot a car on the freeway if the driver keeps a hand on the wheel and by 2016
will have a hands-free system, according to BCG. Honda, Hyundai Motor, and
Toyota’s Lexus line each offer autonomous features that help steer and stop
their cars.
While Toyota has a city test course in Japan that
replicates driving conditions there, M City will give the automaker a chance to
try out technology in a more hectic U.S. environment. And it allows Toyota to
experiment alongside other carmakers testing their own autonomous
cars—something many believe will speed adoption of common standards for such
vehicles. “The value is that it’s open to the public and other researchers,”
Hada says. “That’s the interesting opportunity.”
Since the Michigan test facility is deep within the snow
belt, M City’s managers will leave plenty of the white stuff around to mimic
the patchy snow removal typical of big U.S. cities. Snow and rain wreak havoc
on sensors, and researchers have yet to figure out how to make them see through
a blinding winter squall. “The all-weather test will very much be a benefit,”
says Ron Szabo, director for software services engineering at Delphi
Automotive, which supplies car electronics.
Already the university, automakers, and the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration are testing 3,000 Web-connected cars on
regular Ann Arbor roads, monitoring their ability to communicate road
congestion and local weather. M City research will eventually give those cars
the ability to sense one another and nearby traffic signals. “On the controlled
site we can test the failure of a traffic light,” says Szabo. “In the real-life
situation, you are certainly not going to make that happen.”
The bottom line: Automakers are eager to test their robot
cars in the $6.5 million driverless city being built by the University of
Michigan.
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