Gurwinder Sandhu

Sandhu 1

Professor Douglas
ENGL 2116-007
20 November, 2016
Automated Vehicles
Introduction
Over the past century, engineers have achieved big accomplishments in the automobile
industry. Transportation that used to take an entire day's worth of travel, can now get there in a
matter of a few hours. From vehicles powered by steam, then gasoline, and now electric, the
envelope has been pushed with what cars can do. Automation is about continuing to push that
envelope and discuss the idea of having fully automated vehicles in the near future. Creating safe
self-driving cars is one of the largest challenges currently facing the industry, but if successful, it
can save many lives over the years.
Not only will self-driving vehicles save lives, but it could make commuting much more
efficient (Gordon 969). Controlled vehicles will result in less traffic congestion, which results in
getting to a destination and saving a little bit more fuel than normal cars. Automobile companies
can use this system to implement into their own cars. It has come to a point where having smart
functions in cars that help with daily driving, such as beepers when drifting out of a lane and
traction control to have better control of the car, but room for human error is still too great and
there are still possibilities of getting into accidents that could have been avoided. Automated
vehicles will be very important to make our roads a safer place, but there will be a lot of
challenges we will have to face. With each challenge, engineers will work hard towards finding a
solution for each problem.

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Importance of Automated Vehicles
The main goal of creating these automated vehicles is to prevent accidents from
happening that could cost someone's life. Safety has been a big issue when it comes to the road
system. There are laws that should be followed to ensure safety, but that will not always be
enough. Human error is always a possibility when they are on the road, which could lead to
unforeseen accidents. There are so many distractions when driving and concentration needs to
stay focused on what is in front to stay safe. That is a lot for one person to handle, so careless
mistakes are bound to happen at some point. A computer does not care about distractions that
happen within the car. It is programmed to look out for certain variables that are key to driving
safely and nothing more. Simply, a computer does not get distracted because it knows nothing
more than what it should know.
Self-driving cars are the key to making the roads much safer. With cars that are
constantly checking their surroundings, they will always make sure to stay a safe distance from
any vehicles that are on the road with them. The goal of ensuring safety while being in an
automated vehicles also provides other benefits. Not having to worry about what's going on the
side of the road will also prevent less traffic congestion. For example, a thirty minute commute
to work could be shortened by ten minutes. Because of less traffic congestion, there will not be
as much wasted gas as there normally would be (Gordon 958). Peoples daily lives would simply
be more efficient.
There are also challenges that come with having automated vehicles out on the roads. A
top priority is always to provide a high level of safety when it comes to the road system, so

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certain precautions must take place beforehand. The following reasons have delayed the focus of
producing fully automated vehicles to a later time in the future:
One reason is that the best software techniques needed to implement are unknown. There
have been an abundance of software tools and methodologies at the disposal of engineers, but it
is a matter of utilizing the most efficient for this problem. Algorithms need to consider every
variable: distance between the users car and the car in front of them, speed of the car, speed of
neighboring cars (Shladover 61), is the car on the long highway or in downtown with short
streets, and many more. The car should have the ability to take in huge amounts of data and not
feel overloaded and freeze because it was too much for the computer to handle.
Many traffic laws will be outdated with automated vehicles out on the road. That means
people will have to adapt to how traffic will flow with the use of vehicles that drive themselves.
If an automated car is involved in an accident, it raises the question of who is to blame in this
situation ("Legal Aspects of Automated Cars." 36). Is it the passengers inside the car? Is it the
manufacturer?
Adapting to how traffic will flow sounds easy because it looks like it will be fully
automated, but there will be a long transition period for everyone to switch from manned
vehicles to fully automated cars. There are cars that are twenty plus years old out on the roads
today so you can imagine how long this period might be.
There is also the issue of using the correct hardware for sensors. As of right now,
hardware; such as, lidar, which uses light rays to visualize its surrounding environment, is very
expensive to put in these cars. Even though lidar is a necessary tool for the cars to have,

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engineers must think about if it is viable for the average person to afford such an expensive
vehicle (Ackerman 14).
Therefore, the goal for engineers and the automobile industry is to tackle these challenges
while keeping the safety of humans as the number one priority. They need to figure out how to
utilize the software currently available efficiently, which laws need to be added or amended, and
to figure out what is the best way to produce the hardware to implement into these cars. If people
can overcome these obstacles, then there is a good chance for automated vehicles to thrive within
the society.
Challenges And Their Solutions
Engineers in the automobile industry are the ones that lead the innovation within their
cars to provide a unique service, but also to promote a high level of safety. Automation is the
next step towards creating safer roads for everyone and engineers have now set their eyes
towards making this happen. Automation involves a lot of research and experimentation to be
done beforehand. The challenge will be to create these vehicles and make them as safe as
possible for people to use.
Software Implementation
It goes without question that engineers will definitely use software tools to create self
driving cars. Software is a set of programs that contains instructions for the computer to decode
and execute. This software will be implemented into the sensors as well as the computer inside
the car. It will be responsible for executing instructions that have been written in the proper
programming language successfully. The software will contain algorithms that will calculate the
most efficient distance, speed, and other factors based on internal and external variables; such as,

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tire wear and weather (Kim 2). As time goes on, so will the improvement of software design.
Software design will make software tools much more helpful and reduce the percentage of error
the system might calculate.
Challenges
With the amount of tools engineers have to create software right now, they must figure
out what are the best tools for the job. That means knowing which programming languages they
need to write code, what frameworks to use to have different programming languages function
together, and how they can make code efficient to get back optimal data at a very fast pace. Bad
code writing techniques can lead to having data come back at a much slower rate than
expected("Challenges for Fully Automated Driving." 37). Code must be written and evaluated to
make sure it is clear for other engineers to understand and efficient in its task. Every
programming language has its pros and cons for how it can efficiently do certain tasks.
Understanding how to benefit from the tools available can make creating software much easier
for engineers to implement into the computer and sensors.
Possible Solution
According to research from articles, it can be said that people are using a number of
different techniques and languages to program automation in their projects. From reading
through numerous articles and from others experiences, it can be concluded that one language is
not exactly going to get the job done. A framework is something that provides a solution to a
problem through multiple software tools. One of the languages that seemed to repeat itself
throughout the research was a language called MATLAB. This language is very good at
calculating large amounts of data quickly (Kim 2). If they pair this language and another

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language called Java, which can organize data into "objects", a way to group data for a specific
instance, the benefits of having organized data for MATLAB to be "used as a solver" will be
obtained (Kim 2). Creating automated vehicles is no small task, so the best way to tackle this
problem from an engineering standpoint is to break it down to small parts and understand how
pieces fit together to make the big picture.
Legal Aspect
Traffic laws and making sure cars are legally operational are a very important aspect in
ensuring safety on the road. Laws must always be reviewed and updated as much as possible and
the car itself must portray to the passengers the information that it gets from its sensors. Traffic
laws that will involve the use of automated vehicles must understand how they work and what
are the proper guidelines to keep roads running safe and smooth as possible ("Legal Aspects of
Automated Cars." 36). Laws are meant to be reviewed all the time, so lawmakers must review
current traffic laws and add or change these traffic laws to cooperate with automated vehicles.
Making these changes can help ensure safety for the public.
Challenges
One of the main challenges is within the transition period. This period is when some
people will start using automated vehicles while other will still be using the older cars. People
still drive cars that are twenty plus years old and it is inconvenient for everyone to buy a new car
because the law requires them to all have driverless cars. This transition period will probably
also take a decade or two for most people to own a new self driving car, so the law must be able
to realize both automated and non-automated vehicles on the road.

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Another possible challenge is the possibility of getting into an accident with an
automated vehicle. This raises questions on "who is to blame, the passenger or the car?" ("Legal
Aspects of Automated Cars." 36). If it is the latter, this puts more pressure on the manufacturer
that they guarantee quality cars, so they do not get a pile of lawsuits.
Possible Solution
To tackle the problem of this transition period, people are still going to need to pay
attention to the road. This means that "Cars will be able to control the speed within the
limitations set by the driver and by other information provided, including the road curvature and
posted speed limits." ("Legal Aspects of Automated Cars." 36). Passengers can tell the car the
max speed it should be allowed to go and whether it is on the highway or downtown. Upon
further research, it shows how highways could setup a network for automated vehicles to jump
on (Shladover 55). The network layer will then allow them to send and receive information to
other automated vehicles. Since the automobile industry will be in the transition period for a few
years, it will be better if the car still had some driver assistance, so the vehicle can understand its
environment better with non-automated vehicles around.
Hardware
Having the correct hardware will also be very critical for implementing a system
efficiently. Lidar, which is a type of radar that emits light rays to visualize the environment
around itself, is a new technology that can prove to be very useful. It can help see through most
weather conditions (Greenblatt 51). It returns an enormous amount of data at the speed of light
about its surrounding for the software to utilize (MUKHTAR 2320). Lidar is a very powerful

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sensor to use, but engineers must also consider the disadvantages seen today in order to decide
what type of sensors are most useful for automation.
Challenges
Lidar can be used as a sensor that detects objects by emitting pulses of laser light. Lidar is
a critical sensor for driver-less vehicles because of how accurate the data is across a range of
weather conditions. It is a very reliable piece of equipment that comes with its current
challenges. The sensor, as of right now, would be unappealing to most people interested in a
driverless car. The most popular lidar sensor weighs around thirteen kilograms and costs eighty
thousand dollars (Ackerman 14). Each car would need somewhere between four and six sensors
per car, which makes the price of the car unaffordable for the average person to purchase. Plus,
the weight of each sensor starts to add up which is unnecessary for a car to weigh an extra two
hundred pounds.
Possible Solution
As time goes on, so does the progression of technology. Just this year, they have
announced that they will soon have a sensor that will weigh only six hundred grams and cost
around five hundred dollars. There has been a lot of research that goes into improving lidar
sensors, which means making them smaller and cheaper. They are saying by 2018, they could
possibly release sensors that only cost a hundred dollars (Ackerman 14). It is just a matter of
time before there will be affordable lightweight lidar sensors.
Until then, engineers will have to use a mixture of sensing technology to efficiently
detect objects in its surrounding environment. Cars today already have GPS, which can help

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detect the fastest route possible. A mix of GPS, radar, and lidar can help detect the best route and
lane positioning (Kim 191).
Conclusion
Even though these challenges will be tough to overcome, automated vehicles can be a
viable option for society to utilize and have safer roads. There is not one solution to a challenge
like this one. There are probably a lot of ways engineers could approach this problem.
Technology will improve as time goes on so current tools will become outdated and new tools
will be more efficient for use. Legislation will adapt and change as people make new decisions
on traffic infrastructure. As these technologies and legislation develop as time goes on, the
automobile industry can focus on having their engineers make more efficient algorithms and
designs. Automation, in return, will make the roads much more efficient and safer.

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Work Cited
Ackerman, Evan. "Lidar That Will Make Self-Driving Cars Affordable [news]." Ieee Spectrum.
53.10 (2016). Print.
"Challenges for Fully Automated Driving." Mechanical Engineering. 134.11 (2012). Print.
Gordon, T.J, and M Lidberg. "Automated Driving and Autonomous Functions on Road
Vehicles." Vehicle System Dynamics. 53.7 (2015): 958-994. Print.
Greenblatt, Nathan A. "Self-driving Cars and the Law." Ieee Spectrum. 53.2 (2016): 46-51. Print.
Kim, Beomjun, Dongwook Kim, Sungyoul Park, Yonghwan Jung, and Kyongsu Yi. "Automated
Complex Urban Driving Based on Enhanced Environment Representation with Gps/map,
Radar, Lidar and Vision." Ifac Papersonline. 49.11 (2016): 190-195. Print.
"Legal Aspects of Automated Cars." Mechanical Engineering. 134.11 (2012). Print.
MUKHTAR, A., XIA, L., & TANG, T. B. (2015). Vehicle Detection Techniques for Collision
Avoidance Systems: A Review. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation
Systems. 16, 2318-2338.
Shladover, S E. "Automated Vehicles for Highway Operations (automated Highway Systems)."
Proceedings of the I Mech E Part I Journal of Systems & Control Engineering. 219.1
(2005): 53-75. Print.