October 16, 2019 Vol. 16 No. 21

I wish I could somehow quantify the value of all the research and development work that’s being done on autonomous vehicles of all sorts, from cars to buses to trucks to combines to mine tractors to you name it. Not just in the past couple of years, because the engineering effort is much older than that. The figure, if one could be drawn, is way off into the stratosphere where a billion bucks is small change. That’s why I call it ‘stratotech’, not ‘high tech’.

Despite that, I still have an obligation to bring this down to earth and ask, what’s possible when? What will it mean to you folks buying, managing, and driving trucks today and next year? I don’t really have an answer for that one, at least not without adding many paragraphs worth of qualifications.

Truck drivers still seem to have their minds made up that their jobs are in more or less immediate jeopardy. For at least 95% of the trucking work out there, I say don’t hold your breath. We’re testing Level 4 autonomy in limited ways now, but even then a driver is still part of the mix. Completely driverless Level 5 autonomy won’t happen tomorrow and not for at the very least a decade or more to come. And it sure won’t be a wholesale switch once it does start to happen.

We’re far away from making that work properly, as I said when speaking on a panel at the recent annual meeting of the Canadian Truck Equipment Association. Fact is, we have a lot of legislative, insurance, and social issues to get through first.

But the technology, while amazingly proficient, isn’t there yet either. Like many of you in your trucks, I have some advanced safety features in my own SUV, like active cruise control and forward collision mitigation. Do they work flawlessly? Nope. Can they be dangerous? Yes indeed. I use them but I can’t blindly rely on them to make the right decisions every time. I have to stay alert, actually in additional ways – not fewer – compared to how things were before my ride got all gizmological.

Given all of that, I was especially interested in a recent report by the American Automobile Association.

PEDESTRIAN DETECTION WORKS POORLY

So says the American Automobile Association in a somewhat alarming study, and by all accounts an exhausting one. It was done in partnership with the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center.

On average, nearly 6000 pedestrians lose their lives in the U.S. each year, says the AAA, accounting for 16% of all traffic deaths, a percentage that has steadily grown since 2010.

“The research reveals that automatic emergency braking systems with pedestrian detection perform inconsistently, and proved to be completely ineffective at night,” according to the AAA. “An alarming result, considering 75% of pedestrian fatalities occur after dark. The systems were also challenged by real-world situations, like a vehicle turning right into the path of an adult. AAA’s testing found that in this simulated scenario, the systems did not react at all, colliding with the adult pedestrian target every time.”

Now, bear in mind that the testing was done using four cars, not trucks. But I believe the technology – part of all advanced driver-assistance systems — used in both small and large vehicles is at least very similar, maybe exactly the same. And more than once I’ve heard truck engineering types say that pedestrian detection was proving to be a challenge.

FOUR TEST VEHICLES WERE USED in the AAA testing. Each car was outfitted using industry-standard instrumentation, sensors, and cameras to capture vehicle dynamics, position data, and visual notifications from the pedestrian detection system. Three simulated pedestrian targets were used, each one outfitted with instrumentation to time movement as well as to receive position, speed, and acceleration from the dynamic target. Complete methodology can be found in the full research report, available free of charge here. It makes for interesting reading. See a video here.

Testing used simulated pedestrian targets in several scenarios.

Overall, the systems performed best in the instance of the adult crossing in front of a vehicle traveling at 20 mph during the day. In this case, the systems avoided a collision 40% of the time. But, at the higher speed of 30 mph, most systems failed to avoid a collision with the simulated pedestrian target.