Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12S E V E N Would you tell us a bit about your start at VTTI? I’m a Human Factors Engineer and completed my PHD at Virginia Tech about 30 years ago. I began my career in safety research. I find this type of research incredibly interesting and put my focus on driver safety as that’s really where the highest risk for fatalities reside. I realized I wanted to make a positive impact in this area. My first academic job was at the University of Idaho, and then I moved to the University of Iowa. About 10 years later I returned to Virginia Tech to take on my current role at VTTI, where I have watched the research and staff grow significantly. We started with just over a dozen people, and now VTTI has in excess of 470 employees currently working on more than 300 active projects. What drives VTTI’s growth? When we started all of our work was on public sector projects, but we now have about a 50/50 split between government and private sector research. We are seeing more private companies increasingly invest in research and innovation around driverless and connected (vehicles connected to the Internet or other systems outside the vehicle) technology. The research questions and interests related to connected and autonomous vehicles cover a wide spectrum of research topics. This includes sensors, computers, telemetry, user interfaces, and environmental responses. And of course, with new product technology, the public sector requires research to adapt safety and use policies for the changing driver landscape. There is a great demand for our research capabilities. What differentiates VTTI from other research organizations? On many measures we are one of the largest research institutions in the country, so our scale and capabilities such as our Smart Road, our history as pioneers in naturalist driving studies (NDS), and other innovative research methods set us apart from other options (see the article ‘Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’ in this issue). For instance, we house over 90 percent of the available continuous, naturalist driving data worldwide. Why is Naturalistic Driving Study such an important research method? NDS enables us to collect data on how people actually behave in a way that mitigates the bias and limitations of traditional laboratory conditions. It reduces distractions for the research subjects and enables us to observe more natural behavior. However, this kind of work requires not only smart research designs, but also the right kind of data collection methods such as special cameras and other sensors we have helped to develop. Our long experience with this research has built world class capabilities for VTTI. To date, we have seen more than 4,000 instrumented vehicles deployed nationally and internationally, resulting in more than 40 million miles of continuous naturalistic driving data. NDS is proven to work and the interest in this methodology is ever increasing. We have been hearing a terrific amount of discussion around connected and autonomous vehicles recently. As VTTI is at the center of this new technology, what are you experiencing? This model year for vehicles has produced the biggest change in technology I’ve seen in the past 30 years. There are six vehicles on the market that the driver can remove their hands and/or feet from the controls and it will drive automatically at some level. VTTI is currently testing five of the six vehicles. We will see even more vehicles like this in the 2017 model year. All of these vehicles use different technology to create autonomous functions so it’s a complex and varied group to study. We are also seeing a higher number of connected vehicles than ever before. For the first time, vehicles are broadcasting information into the cloud. For instance, in the near future, data on windshield wiper usage could become available for use by Department of Transportations (DOT) to monitor weather conditions in real-time. When do you think there will be enough connected vehicles on the road to make a wider impact on traffic safety, in terms of things like work zones? Well, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), with whom we work, is currently developing standards with a consortium of car companies regarding connected technology. The timing for the technology to become widely available and installed will largely be based on market pull. Car companies will use consumer demand to evaluate the business importance of this product offering. A good example is vehicle navigation systems, which began testing in the 1980’s. Initially car companies dabbled in navigation systems, but the technology didn’t really take off widely until the early 2000’s, when players like Garmin developed portable systems. Of course now smart phones have significantly replaced the portable systems. Similarly, connected cars are on their own innovation curve and I’d say within 10 years we will notice a critical mass of vehicles with this technology. Once 10-20 percent of vehicles on the road are using connected technology, we will then see advancements in safety through the aggregation of data. Don’t forget that connected vehicles have the potential to share information not only with entities like a DOT but also with other vehicles on the road. The ability to share sensor data across vehicles creates information rich and redundant systems which will result in powerful safety benefits. We’re sure you frequently get asked this question in one form or another, but when will most human drivers be replaced by automated technology? When are we going to stop driving our own cars? I often hear things like “drivers are terrible” and “we need to get people’s hands off the steering wheel through automation.” The fact is, it’s really very hard to build a system better than an alert, sober, and attentive driver. We have hundreds of videos demonstrating that people are incredibly good at avoiding crashes. Humans are still the most effective and robust driving system able to operate in all weather conditions, sun angles, and countless other anomalous situations without crashing. To remove all drivers would require a better system and currently a better system does not exist. I would say we are at least 30 or more years away from that level of automation. The levels of autonomous driving technology and connected vehicles are rapidly evolving, but we still have a long way to go.