THE VIRTUAL DRIVER
By Christopher A. Sawyer

(March 24, 2013) BRIMLEY, Mich. — Brimley is a small town about half an hour outside of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on the upper edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Soo, the phonetic spelling of Sault, is home to shipping, fishing, and is a small town with a few tourist trap overtones. Busiest in the spring, summer and fall when the Soo Locks between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes are operating, it’s a cold and desolate place in the dead of winter; the combination of flat land, deep snow and plentiful pine trees making it an interesting cross between Bavaria and… Kansas.

The cold, snow and remoteness also make it an ideal place to do winter testing. Many automaker, both foreign and domestic, have test centers in this area, as do many automotive suppliers. Continental Automotive has a 540-acre test facility in Brimley that it uses for the development and testing of brake and chassis systems. Soon after our arrival, eight vehicles were arrayed before us, some with current technologies, and others with new ideas. It’s the latter that is of the most interest.

Blind Spot Detection with Trailer Tow

Blind spot detection is available on many new cars, but not on pickups; trailers have a way of driving the radar units crazy with false warnings. By writing a new software algorithm, however, the engineers at Continental have been able to make a trailer effectively disappear, while still giving full coverage in the visible area behind the truck bed.

The biggest hurdle they had to overcome was where to place the pair of 24 GHz radar units. Placing them in the bumper — the normal location on passenger cars — has its problems. Steel bumpers are electronically opaque, making it impossible for the radar to send and receive. Placing plastic caps on the ends of the bumper take care of this problem, but these end caps are more likely to be damaged in use.

Also, it’s not unusual for a pickup’s rear bumper to get tweaked, throwing off the coverage area and measurements. That leaves the rear lighting units, which are mounted high on the pickup box and out of the way of most minor dents and dings. In addition, these plastic housings are electronically clear, making it easy for the radar units to send and receive.

Because the trailer sits in the same position relative to the pickup, the new algorithm can ignore its unchanging Doppler reflection, and block it out from objects that require watching. Special modulation separates all other objects by range, relative speed and angle. And while, in a production car, these same radars concentrate on an area three to 15 meters behind the car at an angle of approximately 150 degrees, the pickup version looks back up to 80 meters at a maximum field of view of 180 degrees; it’s always tracking traffic to the rear.

Currently, a LED in the side mirror lights when an object is in close proximity or accelerating at a rate where it soon will be, though automakers can choose another warning if they want.

Turning on the turn signal on the side the vehicle is approaching sounds an alarm if that vehicle is within the range of contact with either the truck or the trailer it’s pulling. How much space there is between the target and the trailer before the alarm sounds or the LEDs light is determined by the automaker, not Continental.

On the roads around the Brimley test track, it was obvious that the radar units were much better at judging the distance to traffic, knowing much more accurately how much space really existed between the end of the trailer and the approaching car. Since it uses current radar units, but with new software, putting this technology into production would take very little time. With its strong ties to Chrysler, Ford, GM and Toyota, you should expect one of those maker’s full-size pickups to offer this option in the 2015 model year.

Partial Automation/Traffic Jam Assist

It looks like a regular VW Passat built in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but it’s what this car can do that’s a bit… freaky. First, the easy stuff. The Passat is equipped with current production front and rear mid-range radar units, each with a 150-degree field of view and 60 meter range. It also has a production front-mounted long-range radar with a 200 meter range, and a stereo camera vision system borrowed from a Mercedes S-Class (located behind the rearview mirror).

Tying it all together is new software that allows all of this information to be collected and collated to provide a view of what is happening around the car, determine a course of action based on driver action/inaction, and react. That’s the freaky part.



The demonstration begins with the Passat following a car down a long, open stretch at approximately 30 mph. As with automatic cruise control, once the following distance is set, the Passat keeps station and dutifully follows the target car. However, this Passat has a trick up its sleeve. As the car ahead starts to turn right-to-left and back again, the Passat follows without missing a beat. This isn’t something it would do on the road, but is an example of its greater functionality.

Based on this demonstration, a simple question is asked: “If you loaded your destination into the navigation system, would this car be able to drive itself there with no operator intervention?” The answer is amazing: “Yes, and it has. I have covered more than 16,000 autonomous miles in this car,” says the engineer behind the wheel as he pulls one of the few Nevada autonomous vehicle license plates from the driver’s door pocket. Or at least it would be a driver’s door pocket if this car needed a driver.

The fun didn’t stop there. At the far end of the test area sat a foam-filled bag about the size and shape of a car’s rear end, and a metal scaffold from which was suspended a mannequin wearing sweat pants and a Continental coat and baseball cap. My stomach began to roil.

Anyone who read my earlier story about TRW’s safety systems would know that these exercises are not as benign as you might think. No matter how much your rational side tells you that the target is just a dummy and will not be injured should the car you are in hits it, the emotional side recognizes the shape as human and screams — loudly — that this is wrong, and someone is going to get injured or killed. Also, this test had a little something extra to make it even more realistic.

After running at the mannequin at speed a couple of times to prove that the system can bring the car to a complete stop, the third manslaughter attempt included pulling the dummy along the scaffolding to imitate a person running across the street in front of the Passat. The vision systems recognized this, brought the car to a halt, and — since there were no other pedestrians or objects in our path — allowed the Passat to roll forward at a slow speed once the danger was past. Impressive.

Or so I thought. Once again we drove back to the starting point and took another run at the unsuspecting dummy. Only this time speeds were higher, and the likelihood the Passat would stop in time nonexistent. Not wanting to see the proto-human flung over the hood of the car, I turned my head to the side so as to block him from my sight… only to see him reappear on the driver’s side of the Passat as it steered around him.

While this didn’t let me see the car charge toward the pedestrian analog, slow markedly and then swing around him, it did give me a front-row seat to watch as the Continental engineer sat passively with his arms crossed over his chest. He’d done this particular party trick before.

And he’d done it for good reason. It’s expected that by 2016 partially automated vehicles will be available. This means full-speed automatic cruise control with braking to stop and driver-initiated resumption, full-on panic braking capability, and steering assist in emergency maneuvers. By 2020, these elements will be rated for higher speeds, and the steering/braking input increased.

Just five years later, fully automated cars should become available, using much of the same technology previewed on this autonomous VW Passat. One of the biggest problems facing the industry is legal; specifically, who is responsible if the person behind the wheel isn’t driving? It may take a while to answer that question, but it won’t be too far in the future when we will see lines of automated cars driving at speed nearly nose-to-tail with no one other than today’s equivalent of HAL 9000 at the controls.

Low-cost Emergency Brake Assist

Say what you will about the technology in the Passat, it doesn’t do much good if no one can afford it. Consider India, where 60% of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians or the non-luxury market in the developed world, and you see a big opportunity for technology that does many of the most important things the Passat can do, but at a much lower price.



The toughest part about this test — other than running up on the car analog at speed — was looking beyond the seductive beauty of the Alfa Romeo Giulietta on which this technology was installed. The forward-looking short range Lidar (short for Light Detection and Ranging) and single-lens camera units have an 80 meter range, and a degree of overlap. The infrared sensor in the grille is the shorter range unit and confirms the information supplied the medium-to-long range camera located behind the inside rearview mirror. This gives a high degree of confidence, and reduces the number of false interventions to near zero for automatic braking.

This lower cost unit is capable of detecting both stationary and moving objects, making it ideal as an affordable option in a mainstream vehicle. Yet, it can automatically decelerate at up to 1.0 g, making object avoidance possible at speeds up to 50 km/h (31 mph).

Even if the driver responds by taking his foot off the accelerator when a collision is imminent, the system responds by increasing the pre-braking pressure it applied when the threat was first recognized. It also increases the pressure applied by the driver to whatever amount is necessary, up to the maximum available, to ensure there is no contact.

Furthermore…

Continental also showed Surround View, which — while similar to the technology that shows the driver a “God’s eye view” of his vehicle — uses revised software to stitch together the images from the front, rear and side cameras more seamlessly. The resolution is pretty darn good, and it’s possible to back a big truck like the four-door F-150 used in the trailer towing exercise mentioned earlier into a parking slot easily. Also, this imaging technology is quite useful when it comes to parallel parking. Combine it with the trailer towing radar system, and you have a pretty formidable combination when it come to towing a boat, and putting it in/towing it out of the water.

The 2013 Ford Fusion/Lincoln MKZ, and all members of VW’s MQB family, come equipped with Continental’s Integrated Parking Brake. It adds a ball screw drive and electric motor to each of the rear brake calipers, creating a by-wire (no mechanical system for engagement) parking brake.

Pull and hold the parking brake switch, and this system is capable of bringing the car to a complete stop. If there has been no hydraulic failure, it engages all four brakes to stop at an automaker-determined deceleration rate. (Ford sets the maximum deceleration for this system at 0.3 g.) Should there be a hydraulic failure in the braking system, pulling the switch causes the two rear calipers to engage and bring the car to an ABS-engaged stop.

And it can do this with two tires on dry pavement and the other two on ice. This parking brake has another party trick: it reads the torque from the engine and angle of the vehicle, and releases the parking brake when there’s enough power to overcome the pull on the vehicle. And there’s nothing quite like being parked on a 30% grade, nose pointed toward Heaven, and driving over the hill without any fuss or bother.

The Virtual Driver