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04/14/2008Virtual Travel and the Fully Networked Car
The 4th annual "Fully Networked Car" workshop took place last month at the International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland. Jointly organised by the ITU, ISO and IEC, the workshop drew over 200 participants. Tim Kelly posted an excellent summary on the ITU website, with links to all the presentations. According to Kelly, two themes shaped this year's discussion: "the contribution that ICTs and intelligent transport systems (ITS) can make to the global combat against climate change" and Formula 1 racing as "an R&D melting pot which is helping to shape the future of the [automobile] industry." Formula 1 certainly seems to be pushing the envelope. Some racing teams have as many as 300 radio channels connecting their cars to the pit crews, and in the near future, up to 100 car-mounted sensors will impose a mobile bandwidth requirement of 500 MB/sec. With this much connectivity, one might think F1 is moving toward remotely-controlled cars with no onboard driver. But they say it isn't so. However, others are working on fully automatic vehicles. Many of you probably know about DARPA's Grand Challenge. In 2004 and 2005, competitors had to outfit cars to complete a 200 km course on rough desert roads between Los Angeles and Las Vegas with no driver or external human control. Fifteen teams entered the race in 2004; none made it to the finish line. But the following year, 23 teams entered and 5 of them finished the race successfully, showing rapid progress towards a fully autonomous auto. Last year, DARPA raised the bar, describing their 2007 race as the "Urban Challenge" because driverless vehicles had to operate in traffic, "performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking and negotiating intersections". Four German teams made it to the semi-finals; the Fraunhofer Institute will show their creation next week at the Hannover Messe (21-25 April). Several speakers at the Geneva workshop pointed out that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cars have primarily focussed on increasing fuel efficiency by redesigning the vehicle. But Pierre Malaterre of 4iCOM claimed that "telematics and the application of intelligent transport systems (ITS) offer the best solution for improved fuel efficiency... there is scope for economizing around 20-50 per cent of the energy currently being used, [although] this will require [much] higher investment in infrastructure, greater education of drivers and increased standardization efforts in the area of ITS...." Vehicle-mounted RFID tags and roadside sensors are already used in a growing number of places for collecting congestion-zone and rush-hour surcharges (e.g. Singapore), for highway tolls (e.g. Latin America), to gather information about "bottlenecks" and "roads in disrepair", and even to "make personalized route recommendations to drivers" (e.g. the CarTel project in Boston). A UK government thinktank, Foresight, says RFID could make driverless cars the norm by 2056. A few days ago, the New York Times reported that Microsoft will introduce "a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams... The Clearflow system will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the United States. Microsoft says it will give drivers alternative route information that is... attuned to current traffic patterns on both freeways and side streets." Let's hope it works better than Live Search or Vista. Austria started blanketing the A2 highway near Klagenfurt with Wi-Fi in 2006, to provide travellers with free wireless Internet access, VoIP and local warning messages while gathering traffic and weather data. This pilot project -- Europe's first -- is testing the feasibility of using Wi-Fi at highway speeds. The limited signal range of license exempt equipment means a vehicle travelling at 130 km/hour must negotiate a hand-off about every 3 seconds -- quite a challenge. But if there is enough demand for the service it may be upgraded to mobile WiMAX, now that certified equipment is available for that standard. Providing this sort of connectivity for vehicles is much easier in cities, where traffic moves slower. Of course, protocols other than Wi-Fi -- and bands other than 2.4 GHz -- might be more practical. At the "Fully Networked Car" workshop, Martin Arndt, who works on ITS at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, contrasted the full interoperability of GSM equipment with today's "tower of babel" that prevails among automobiles made by different manufacturers. The use of proprietary systems prevents different families of cars from communicating with each other, and makes the development of roadside transceivers to serve all models more complicated. Many potentially useful services are blocked by the lack of open common standards. However, Arndt hopes these will emerge now that Europe, the US and Japan have agreed to use frequencies around 5.9 GHz for short-range vehicular communications. ICTs could constitute 35 percent of a car's cost by 2010, according to Freescale's CEO, Michael Mayer. One still cannot ignore the fact that even if telematics and ITS reduce car emissions by 50 percent -- as Pierre Malaterre says is possible -- Malaterre's Powerpoint shows that even then, automobiles would still produce more carbon dioxide than any other mode of transport. More efficient carbon-fueled cars thus cannot solve the greenhouse gas problem. Other means of transport must take over. 
Unfortunately, Andreas Schäfer's presentation showed why that will be hard: there is a global trend away from mass transit, which is becoming stronger as Europe, the former Soviet republics, Latin America and Asia follow the US's lead toward individualised mobility. Could bicycles, motor scooters and electric vehicles replace the gas-guzzlers in our lives? It might help if ITS designers come up with support services especially for them -- and of course for mass transit. Perhaps the best hope is to reduce the need for travel -- by consuming less; reorganising neighborhoods to bring work, shopping, schools and homes closer together; and by relying more on "virtual travel" through our browsers, telephones, televisions and radios. 
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