20 June 2018
The commercial vehicle industry is constantly testing and developing technology to ensure vehicles remain safe on our roads. One area in which CV manufacturers are focusing is driverless technology in adverse weather conditions.
Manufacturers already perform extensive vehicle testing in extreme winter conditions in order to guarantee that their products remain reliable all year round. In the future, that requirement will extend to the emerging field of autonomous systems, too. Industry suppliers and government agencies are collaborating to ensure that driverless technology will continue to function safely.
One such example is the Finnish Transport Agency (FTA)’s Aurora project in Lapland, part of a wider transport services market collaboration.
The E4/E8 corridor is used by trucks that bring salmon over the border from Norway and down to Helsinki airport for export. Now a 10km stretch of the E8 has been upfitted with cameras, scanners, marker posts, a positioning service and communications infrastructure. Industry and technology specialists are already taking advantage of this ‘open ecosystem’ to test their latest developmentsin snowy and icy Arctic conditions.
“Part of the Aurora project is the Arctic Challenge study, where proof-of-concept vehicles are testing sensors, information technology and physical and digital infrastructure adaptations that will hopefully be capable of handling winter conditions,” says Ilkka Kotilainen, Arctic Challenge project manager at the FTA. “If we want year-round, 24/7 automated driving, we’ll need Nordic know-how and the ability to handle Arctic conditions.”
Offered as a complement to private test tracks, this is no well-lit, gritted motorway: in an area that experiences winter conditions for around eight months a year, this tree-lined road already provides challenging conditions for logistics companies and their drivers. As such, it is an ideal winter test ground for driverless technologies.
The first of three Arctic Challenge open test sessions concluded in January, with preliminary results to be published in the summer by participating industry coalitions and the FTA. The second will come in October 2018, with the last to be held in March next year. The lessons learned will be made public at the end of 2019 and presented at international conferences in 2020.
One of the companies testing its technology at Aurora is Sensible4. This Finnish startup is developing a control system for autonomous vehicles that will be initially targeted at buses and other shared vehicles such as rental cars and taxis, where removing the driver provides a clearer business case to make the switch to autonomy. In time, it expects its Level 4 autonomy-capable system to appear on trucks, too. The company has no plans to manufacture entire vehicles but is building a winter-capable autonomous shuttle bus as a technology demonstrator.
“We’re focused on winter development, but there’s demand for this technology from areas where, for example, tropical rains also create problems for these systems,” observes Harri Santamala, CEO of Sensible4. “Extreme climate conditions are a way of validating that your system is environmentally agnostic. The point of going to Lapland for testing is that if we’re comfortable with the positioning and obstacle detection in those conditions, then we’ll be fine in milder conditions as well.”
Santamala identifies the positioning, obstacle detection and driving dynamics of autonomous vehicles as all being a challenge in winter conditions. Road markings and signs are obscured, familiar shapes such as buildings and vegetation change form when covered in snow, and the available grip can change quickly.
The solutions lie in ensuring that more than one type of sensor is providing data on the vehicle’s surroundings, in careful processing of that data, in robust tuning of the vehicle control system, and in using the shared information from vehicle-to-vehicle, to anticipate the conditions ahead and adjust the vehicle’s behaviour accordingly.
Elsewhere, autonomous technologies are being developed to remove snow – specifically, from airport runways. Once again the impetus is coming from a Nordic country, but the systems being developed could help prevent costly flight cancellations at UK airports, too.
In Norway, airport operator Avinor is targeting remote operation for some of its lesser-used regional airports. Part of the project involves remote control-tower functions; another is remote snow removal. This winter, a successful demonstration with RTK GPS-guided Mercedes trucks was completed by Yeti Snow Technology – a 50/50 joint-venture between technology company Semcon and Øveraasen, a supplier of airport snow-removal equipment – to clear a runway at Fagernes airport, 120 miles north of Oslo. Next winter, with drivers on board as backup, Yeti’s removal planning and control technology is expected to be trialed in routine snow clearance at several Norwegian airports.
“Removing snow involves multiple vehicles,” explains John Emil Halden, project manager at Semcon. “Several vehicles have a plough, a brush and a blower. Then you have a large snow blower, a command car and a dumper, all working together to clear the runway. We’re making a system for all of these kinds of vehicle. In the trials, some will be autonomous, some will have driver assistance, and some will be monitored to learn and see how they work.”
Semcon envisages a four-step path to full autonomy. First, a planning and training module will digitally plan airport snow-removal operations. This is crucial because different types of snow and different weather conditions – wind direction, etc – affect the removal process.
The second step will be to instrument vehicles with navigation and communication equipment so that the manually driven vehicles can be monitored and logged in real time. A third will be to provide driver assistance – instructions on where to drive and what to do with the equipment. Finally, when autonomous vehicles are available from the OEMs – which Halden believes could be only two-three years away – they will be incorporated into the snow-removal mission.
The planning and monitoring, training and driver-assistance functions are all expected to provide value to infrequently snowy airports, such as those in the UK.
“You can do a lot of system learning in the first two-three years on an airport equipped with the planning and monitoring system,” claims Halden. “You continually refine the snow-removal plans based on the logs. Airports that will never go fully autonomous could still derive efficiency benefits from this through refining the plans and training their personnel.
“At airports where you have less frequent snowfalls, people have less training and more need for this system to help them,” he observes. “At a larger airport with a lot of traffic and only a few snowy days, having as many as 300-400 trained people on standby represents a substantial cost. I think these airports will want the driver-assistance system, too, because it will provide online, real-time instructions on how to operate. That could be available within three years.”
