Automated driving cognoscenti descended on San Diego in July to share their latest accomplishments and plans at the Automated Road Transportation Symposium (ARTS). The takeaway: a consensus is emerging as to how to deploy and operate driverless services that are safe and profitable, while enhancing the mobility of goods and people.
With 600 attendees, ARTS brought together professionals developing safe tech, industry analysts, researchers, and a wide range of public sector experts from cities, states, and national governments from around the world.
Sponsored by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the non-profit ARTS event has been held since 2012 in one form or another. In the early years, most of the AV tech developers were in their own isolated worlds, furiously working just to implement the basics of robots driving their vehicles, while the ARTS attendees came more from a research and policy space.
The AV players who did show up back then could be a little iffy. For instance, at the 2014 meeting a techie named Kyle Vogt was providing demos of Audi vehicles retrofitted for self-driving. His business model was along these lines: “give me your Audi and I’ll fix it up so it will do the driving for you.” My experience of the demo? Interesting, but not ready for prime time. Whattya know: within a year, his company was acquired by General Motors and became Cruise Automation. It was a very frothy time.
Year after year, in a virtuous cycle, the tech companies increasingly saw the value of engaging with the research and policy side as their vehicles started testing on public streets. In turn, the researchers and government policy developers came to appreciate the immense focus that the tech developers had on safety (at least most of them). This combination of expertise and deep connections forged over the past twelve years has brought the group to where it is today.
Jane Lappin, a partner at Blue Door Strategy and Research, chairs the TRB Vehicle-Highway Automation Committee and is co-founder of ARTS. As leader of this year’s ARTS Planning Committee, she described their process as follows: “We develop our program to balance the interests of the AV industry, safety regulators, state and local governments, and researchers with the specific, singular goal of maintaining an open, informed dialog among them.” She stressed that ARTS “is intended to keep everyone focused on shared challenges, the big thorny societal challenges that no one sector can address alone.”
It’s not that stunning breakthroughs are made on any specific challenge at ARTS. It’s that the players can brainstorm about one another’s aims and challenges, debate strategies, and develop relationships so that dialogue can continue throughout the coming year.
In a post-event discussion, Ms. Lappin noted that, “Looking over our proceedings from the early years, its striking that the headline issues are the same, but the substance of this year’s discussions were much more advanced, better informed, and grounded in direct experience with the automated vehicle systems.”
Convening the Many
A strong showing from USDOT agencies, as well as State and local government officials, provided a wide range of expertise in policy, road operations, and enforcement. This was bolstered by government experts from Canada, Japan, and Europe, including the United Kingdom. China was not well represented, which is unfortunate due to the substantial robotaxi deployments happening there.
Think tanks such as Mitre and Rand were in the mix, along with senior researchers from universities around the world.
But it’s all theoretical unless the tech deployers are present. Company reps from a wide range of Automated Driving Systems (ADS) developers were present at ARTS. In fact, some were on the teams planning and running the breakout sessions.
The key U.S. robotaxi players were present, i.e., Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox. For automated shuttles, Beep and May Mobility were active in the discussions. Nuro covered the home delivery space. Carmakers present included Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
For automated trucking, tech developers Aurora, Forterra, Gatik, Kodiak, Plus, and Waabi were on-deck. Daimler Trucks, Navistar, and Volvo Trucks also had representatives present at ARTS.
Private sector infrastructure tech player CAVNUE was present, discussing their deployments in Michigan and Texas.
It is uncommon for so many ADS developers – across both people and freight movement – to be at the same event for four days straight, particularly an event devoted exclusively to autonomy. This led to interesting hallway mashups with their scientific and government counterparts as they reacted to the various talks.
Cruise Returns To The Fold
This past spring, Steve Kenner was named as the first Chief Safety Officer at Cruise. Mr. Kenner is well known to many in the ARTS community, having spent over 30 years with automakers before jumping into automated driving development at Apple, Uber, Aurora, Locomation, and Kodiak in turn. In the majority of these cases, he had safety responsibility.
Given the tough road Cruise has navigated since the 2023 ARTS, Mr. Kenner was clearly the star of the show. And, a welcome breath of fresh air. He made it very clear that Cruise is a changed entity, with the aspiration that its self-driving system should be a “role model driver.”
He reviewed their current testing activities in Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. Cruise’s attitude with host cities was on display as Mr. Kenner stressed that, “We will launch ‘with them’ not ‘at them.’”
Deployment timing was on everyone’s minds, but in keeping with the newer and more careful corporate culture, he offered no specific timeline.
It was significant to hear that Cruise will be bringing on an independent evaluator to do a complete review of their safety case before removing safety drivers. More and more, this concept of third-party review, in some form, is taking root across the automated driving space.
Mr. Kenner also revealed that Cruise will be a founding member of a new research collaborative led by Mitre. In relying on its from long experience in defense and aviation. Mitre will examine how operations centers and remote operations can enhance the management of AV fleets.
These were the first public comments of Mr. Kenner’s tenure. An more detailed summary provided by Automotive News is available here.
Oh! The Discussions!
ARTS is distinguished by having a strong focus on breakout sessions. The variety of topics, crowdsourced within the research community, were head-spinning. In fact, there were 24 breakout sessions, each several hours in duration. Here are some examples:
· How Can Automated Driving Be Compared with Today’s Human Driving?
· Look Up! Grounding AV Safety Approaches in Aviation Best Practices
· Curbs: How Will Autonomous Pick-up/Drop-off Unlock Better Curb Allocation?
· Disability-Forward AV Thinking: Changing Perspectives to Achieve AV’s Potential
· An ODD and a Scenario Walk Into a Bar…… and ask for Safety Driven Validation
Conclusion
There’s no other event like ARTS anywhere in the world.
What was newsworthy there? In a nutshell, the news was a lack of news.
For a tech sector which has been sometimes reckless in years past, ARTS 2024 was a testament to the maturity of the autonomy developers, the evolution of government agencies who must protect the public, and the deep level of dialogue across all sectors which is fundamental to achieving the benefits promised by automated driving: enhanced mobility, and a new era of road safety. The flavor of ARTS was that, although profits are fundamental, the commercial interests, in the end, want what the public sector interests want.
This is the first of two articles reviewing the action at ARTS. Part Two will dive into some of the breakout session discussions.
Looking forward, Ms. Lappin notes, “We need to spend more time considering the central role of markets and finance. It’s critically important for policymakers to understand the influence of the financial markets in bringing these innovations to market. It costs buckets of money to build a safe, reliable automated vehicle; companies need big investors and stockholders who feel confident that they’ll see a return on their investments soon. The AV companies are bringing vehicles into revenue service in stages, fast enough to demonstrate progress, to develop the market, but not so fast as to get ahead of the funding or the system’s operating capabilities. I don’t think our public sector colleagues appreciate the extent to which capital is influencing current decisions about AV operations.”
Not that everything is resolved, of course. There are concerns and conundrums. But the level of mutual respect facilitated by ARTS creates a solid foundation to keep rolling ahead to make the most of this remarkable technology.
Note: Many of the presentations provided at ARTS 2024 are available for download on the TRB ARTS website.
Disclosure: Richard Bishop advises or holds equity positions for the following companies: Aurora, Forterra, Gatik, Plus.
