How IoT is already making roads safer
By Jack Sullivan
IoT is already affecting most areas of our lives and transportation is no exception. Even before the age of autonomous cars IoT is improving road safety and I’m going to express this through my own personal experience and other uses. I am currently working in Dublin and I travel back home to Waterford every weekend to see my family. For the first few months, I would take the bus and with the frequent stops, distance and Dublin Traffic the journey would take 4 hours! This meant I was travelling on average for 8 hours over the weekend. This was far too time consuming and having already passed my driving test I decided I should start driving myself. This meant getting my own car and getting my own insurance. A decision which is more expensive now but works out cheaper in the long run. The insurance company I was with while being a named driver don’t take new drivers unless they have one year’s no-claims bonus. So I had to search for an insurance company that would consider me. I came across a company called ‘BoxyMo’.
How does it work? A small IoT device gets placed under the dashboard inside the car. Using telematics technology, the device monitors my driving patterns, and depending how well I am driving the insurance is cheaper. What does it monitor? The device monitors speed, driving smoothness which is broken down into braking, cornering and acceleration and other factors of location, distance travelled and time of day. This initiative gives new drivers an incentive to drive safe with the reward of cheaper insurance.
There are other ways which IoT is improving road safety. By adding IoT sensors to fleet vehicles new opportunities for business efficiency appear. Fleet operators need accurate data to maximise the efficiency of each vehicle and driver. Using the same technology as BoxyMo, operators can keep track of fleet productivity, as well as gaining insight into driver behaviours and vehicle performance. Furthermore by connecting to the cloud, sensor technology can be fitted to fleet vehicles to monitor faults and give updates on maintenance. This in turn helps reduce the cost of unplanned maintenance and unexpected downtime. Intelligent fleets enable two way communication, making it easier for drivers and managers to keep in touch. This can be used to monitor the well-being of drivers or route changes or faults with the vehicle.
IoT combined with other technologies such as AI, big data and machine learning are necessary technologies in the production of autonomous cars. They will require enormous amounts of data collecting and processing. One bonus with implementing IoT in autonomous cars is it will allow for V2V (vehicle to vehicle) communication. Through IoT, autonomous cars will share information of the road including obstacles and traffic. This data will be shared between connected cars and uploaded to a cloud system to be analysed and improve automation. The task of a machine learning algorithm will be to carry out a constant rendering of the surrounding environment and predicting possible changes to those surroundings. How will it work? IoT connectivity analyses the feedback from the sensors on the vehicle and sends instructions to the AI controlled components of the car (braking, steering and acceleration). For example, imagine you are driving along a road and you receive information from a car a kilometre down the road that the road is impassable, your autonomous car acknowledges this and re-routes a different path, perhaps without you even realising!
How far are we from this? The UK government announced that by 2021 autonomous cars could be in full use on Britain’s roads. This comes after heavy investment and a change in laws regarding autonomous vehicles from the UK government in 2015, investing £20 million into the technology. While fully automated cars are still a year or two out, we do have some experience with partial automation technology with the BMW 7 series having a feature of automated parking and can also be controlled remotely. Earlier in 2018, some German automakers paid $3.1 billion for the Nokia Here mapping service, which will be used as a platform for a car connected environment that combines precise digital maps to be used with real time vehicle data. For an option like this to be viable both autonomous vehicles and non-autonomous vehicles will be required to have this technology. However, with there being 37.3 million licensed cars in the UK at the end of 2016 implementing this technology in the UK alone is many years out. It is most certainly not for the want of trying however, as of May 2018 there are over 400 autonomous cars registered to be tested on public roads in California — and this number is only going to rise!
As you can see form this chart from Statista, the competition to become the first to master the autonomous car is heating up, with all the expected entries like BMW and Tesla high on the list. Although, it is unexpected to see a company like Apple, who are attempting to make waves in the autonomous vehicle market, up in second place with 55 registered vehicles. This shows just how competitive the market is and how profitable it can be. While the reward for being remembered in the history books as the first to master the art is extremely attractive, there is no room for failure as the consequences for such would be deadly.
Perhaps the most unpredictable factor when it comes to fully autonomous vehicles is not the technology itself — but us! The human factor pose challenges not only for drivers but pedestrians also. When speaking about ethical issues relating to autonomous vehicles the “trolley problem” is always discussed. What would you do? Leave the trolley on its path and do nothing? Or would you pull the lever and divert the cart onto another path but with the same deadly consequences? However with autonomous vehicles it is more than a simple pull of a lever, there are many more factors to take into account, like the rules of the road for example. I won’t go into too much detail on this but I do invite you to take part in a study from MIT called the Moral Machine, this study generates two destructive dilemmas involving autonomous vehicles and pedestrians, asking participants to choose between the two dilemmas. The information collected from this study is used for further research regarding decisions an autonomous car should make. Its studies like this that give experts better insights and help find solutions to issues that autonomous cars will inevitably face.
When autonomous cars become the norm could we see an introduction to a universal rules of the road? Could we see all nations driving on the same side of the road? If not, what would happen if an autonomous car from the UK (drives on the left) took the ferry to France (drives on the right)? These are all questions that remain to be answered. For the moment however, I will take cheaper insurance.
*views expressed here are personal and do not represent any company.
