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Smart Roads on the Map? Can automated highways break America's traffic jam? By George Leopold, EE Times San Diego, Calif. -- Congestion on U.S. highways is a lot like the weather: everybody complains about it but few do anything to relieve it. That may be changing as a consortium made up of some of the country's leading automotive-electronics manufacturers prepares to showcase emerging automated-highway technology here this week. Proponents say deployment of smart highways is an urgent need as traffic snarls grow, giving rise to the phenomenon of "road rage," which has led to accidents, shootings and other highway mayhem. Adding to the urgency, traffic on U.S. highways is expected to double by 2020. With highway funds tight, advocates insist that automated highways will also eliminate the need to build more roads. Architectural decisions about a U.S. automated-highway system--defining such things as the degree of cooperation among vehicles, and between vehicles and the smart-highway infrastructure--are 12 to 18 months away, officials said. Still to be decided is whether automated vehicles will be able to share the road with other cars, trucks and buses. Until such issues are nailed down, engineers will have to demonstrate the feasibility of existing technologies while developing new ones, said Jim Rillings, program manager for the National Automated Highway System Consortium (Troy, Mich.), which is sponsoring this week's demonstrations. For instance, Rillings said the current demo is built around the QNX real-time operating system from QNX Software Systems Ltd. (Kanata, Canada). To improve reliability and performance, consortium members Carnegie Mellon University; the University of California, Berkeley, and Lockheed Martin are devising a proprietary real-time OS. Another road block is embedded communications. The demo system stitches together a hodgepodge of LANs, cell phones and satellites, along with office-style PCs. No protocols yet exist for ensuring smooth roadway communications. Nevertheless, Rillings insisted in an interview that "many [automated-highway] technologies are road-ready today. The technology exists, but it's not ready to go from an economic standpoint." The impetus to develop new schemes is growing as the electronics industry, government and transportation experts attempt to apply embedded-systems technology to the twin problems of traffic congestion and energy efficiency. The efforts, led by high-tech firms looking for promising new markets, are moving in parallel with state and federal programs designed to safely move traffic in urban and rural areas more efficiently. The smart-highway consortium will open 7.6 miles of automated highway in a commuter lane of Interstate 15 in San Diego this week. The system boasts automatic steering, throttling and braking, magnet sensors, adaptive cruise control, radar-based collision avoidance and "lane-keeping" schemes that rely on sensors to track magnetic lane markers. All told, consortium members will demonstrate seven different traffic scenarios, ranging from "platoons" of Buick LeSabres riding down I-15 in close formation to maintain traffic flow, computer-vision gear and an alternative technology demonstration of radar-reflective tape that can guide vehicles along the road using a narrowband radar. Besides Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon and the UC Berkeley engineering school's PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways), consortium members include Bechtel Group, the San Francisco-based construction engineering giant; Delco Electronics; General Motors; Hughes; Parsons Brinckerhoff; the California Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Transportation Department, which pays most of the bills out of a $200 million research-and-development budget. So far, the group has spent about $20 million in funds from a program approved by Congress in 1991, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. Affectionately known as "Ice Tea," a variation on its acronym, the program is up for renewal this year. Budget politics aside, technical issues, including communications, loom once the demonstrations end. For now, vehicle platoons communicate via local-area networks, while individual vehicles use digital communications over dedicated frequencies. Dial-up cell phones are used for low-priority messages, such as removing roadway obstacles. Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers are also used to pinpoint obstacles for removal. Carrier-phase GPS may eventually be used for higher-frequency applications, planners said. Other hardware is decidely low-tech. In the demo system, nearly all computers are office-style PCs or single-board versions of those machines. Special-purpose computers are so far used only for sensing. The immediate goal, Rillings said, is to prove the concepts his engineers have been working on and bring smart-highway technology out of the lab and onto the road. "We want to try and understand how to do this reliably and economically," he said. "That's the biggest engineering challenge right now." The next milestone will be selection, in March 1999, of a U.S. automated-highway system that combines the best components being tested now. A prototype is scheduled for demonstration in 2002. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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