The consumer road to self-driving cars

How consumers drive automotive innovation

The consumer road to self-driving cars

5 minutes

People of Pittsburgh have shared city streets with Uber's experimental self-driving cars since last year. In Atlanta, a busy stretch of roadway is gearing up for driverless vehicles that can communicate with smart traffic lights and other infrastructure. Earlier this year, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation announced ten self-driving “proving grounds” in cities such as Madison, Wisconsin and San Diego.

What many Americans may not realize is that they are already using autonomous features as self-driving technology moves from research to something people rely on daily. In a recent AAA survey, 59% of respondents said that they want autonomous tech in their next vehicle.

Lessons from consumer electronics
This is a tremendous time to be involved in auto tech. The pace of change, the ideas, the willingness to commit to invention has never been greater. What we’ve learned after almost 100 years of consumer technology development at Panasonic, is that the “wow” wears off quickly. Companies that successfully introduce innovations design them so consumers intuitively understand their features. With intuitive use comes delight, trust, and ultimately, from a consumer’s perspective, technology that disappears behind the experience it supports.

The tech adoption curve allows us to bucket auto innovation over the last few decades into four categories: Latent; Just in Time; Cognitive; and Precognitive. This has been a slow process, which leads us to believe that full “go anywhere” autonomy – meaning no human driver intervention – is years away.

Phase 1: Seat belts—a latent technology
The latent bucket can be described as the individual triggering a feature. Safety belts are an example. It took decades to identify the need, get them into vehicles, and – longest of all – get people to use them. Similarly, ABS brakes were rejected for years because drivers didn’t like their feel.

Phase 2: Airbags signal just-in-time phase
Airbags and other active safety technologies moved the industry into a just-in-time phase--when the vehicle or the individual can both trigger an action to avoid catastrophe. That airbag sensor triggered technology the moment the occupants needed it.

Phase 3: Learning a driver’s behaviors
Today, cognitive technologies can “learn” a driver’s behaviors, sense and react. Even with partial information, these smart systems can make decisions to increase safety, and build trust in more sophisticated autonomous features. Now we’re reaching drivers through multiple senses – eyes, ears, touch – and providing a back-up when their own senses might fail them. Panasonic is enabling these technologies by integrating a middleware solution into our in-vehicle infotainment platform to close gaps in the consumer’s journey. We can identify patterns of travel without having to manually select news, traffic and entertainment to complement the route.

Phase 4: The era of predictive thinking
Each day in the U.S., more than eight people are killed and 1,161 injured in crashes reported to involve a distracted driver, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This needs to change.

As an industry, we’ve made a lot of progress in knowing the consumer. The next move is to predict behavior to further close that experience gap, and increase safety, so that a car can sense a situation coming up—another vehicle with a blown tire 20 cars ahead--and begin to prevent it, with or without the driver for a safer experience. As we move into precognitive systems, which enable vehicles to cooperate with the environment, the infrastructure, the other vehicles, and reduce cognitive load on the driver, we can start to relieve the amount of attention needed by the driver. Because we know the vehicle, passengers and environment, we can better understand how to enable these technologies for an improved experience. We’re not talking about forecasting six months from now. It’s about understanding what a consumer wants at this very moment. Wherever they are, whatever they’re doing.

Read about the ecosystem of smart transportation.

About our expert: Andrew Poliak is Vice President Product Planning and Business Development at Panasonic Automotive Systems of America

The role consumers play in innovation.
Authors
Andrew Poliak - Vice President Product Planning and Business Development at Panasonic Automotive Systems of America
Poliak has nearly two decades of experience in the automotive industry.

The Internet of Vehicles

the-internet-of-vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles

3 minutes

As innovation accelerates, it isn’t hard to imagine a world where cars drive themselves, or even fly. But cars that talk and think? You might be shaking your head, but that’s exactly where mobility is headed.

At ITS World Congress that starts in mid-September in Copenhagen, Panasonic’s Jarrett Wendt will offer ideas on the connected vehicle ecosystem enabling cars to communicate with each other and the road around them. If your travels don’t include Denmark in September, here are a few highlights.

The world is changing at hyper speed

As anyone in the tech world understands, disruption is the new normal. Constant innovation is now the price of entry, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially. Adoption rates have also accelerated dramatically. As inventor and futurist and Ray Kurzweil noted, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in this century – at today’s accelerated pace, it will be more like 20,000 years worth.

In our recent “Moving Forward,” research series, Panasonic Corp. of North America assesses how senior technology decision makers in industries including automotive view the technologies they see driving us forward, and the impact of these technologies on future plans. By 2025, 10 disruptive technologies are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic impact. Our new research reveals that tech decision makers in automotive, avionics industries and related government agencies say their companies have already adopted five of these technologies on average. And four have risen to the top of their innovation agendas – energy storage, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and sustainable energy. Panasonic is deeply engaged in all of them.

The future of transportation is integrated

There has been a great deal of prototyping and testing of Intelligent Transportation Systems, but working with the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, Panasonic has developed a phased approach that will allow DOTs to effectively deploy these technologies at scale. Not just a system for main highways and thoroughfares, but for all roadways and arteries throughout an entire state or region.

Our role? A technology-agnostic strategic consultant, general contractor and solution integrator.

We’re one year into our real-world deployment along a particularly challenging 90 mile stretch of I-70 in Colorado, connecting Denver to Vail, where Coloradans face steep grades, severe curves, often-extreme weather, visibility and congestion difficulties. This is a 5-year, $72 million V2X program featuring a road-operator managed data platform deployed on active, open roadways.

Data has the power to drive safety

With our Intelligent Transportation solution, we’re talking about empowering DOTs with the ability to analyze everything from speed and heading, to windshield wiper and traction control status – providing valuable context on road conditions.

Suddenly, a roadway operator can receive this data and make up-to-the-minute decisions about deploying snowplows during winter storms – or optimize how traffic flows through the city in real time.

This technology can also communicate instantly about emergency braking and crashes, and enables customized alerts to be sent to cars in specific locations instantaneously.

Imagine driving along the highway in the mountains and a crash occurs 1,000 feet down the road and around a blind turn. V2X will enable our vehicles to warn us or even react on our behalf – to prevent us from becoming a part of the incident even before the compromised vehicle is visible. And emergency services can be deployed more expeditiously, and more cost-effectively, than ever before.

Talking cars can reduce traffic

Connected vehicle technology will save lives through a significant reduction in the number of non-impaired crashes – estimates are as high as 80%. CDOT estimates as much as a 400% increase in roadway efficiency with wide scale deployment of connected vehicle technology – without the expense of widening roadways and adding lanes. The system is also expected to reduce the amount of time people spend in traffic and lessen the environmental impact of idling cars by mitigating congestion.

Read more about how disruptive technology is impacting transportation in The Year of the Smart Highway.

Authors
Tom Gebhardt - Chairman and CEO, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

Future of Bluetooth Mesh Networks

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

4 minutes

The most inspiring example of the power of mesh networks, a distributed communication system, where each device acts as a node that can relay data to the others, lies in the island of Puerto Rico. That’s where a couple of volunteers with antennas, wireless mesh devices and solar panels helped to restore communications for relief effort coordinators in Barranquitas, a city battered by Hurricane Maria. “Within three days, volunteers were using both technologies to more effectively coordinate the delivery of food and medicine,” according to an article in Quartz.

Disaster management and public safety is one reason for the strong growth forecast for the global wireless mesh network market, but not the only one, according to a new report by Zion Market Research. Its study finds that the global wireless mesh network market was valued at $3.84 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach around $9.08 billion by 2024. The oil & gas Industry, video streaming and surveillance, smart mobility and smart city applications are among the biggest drivers of growth of mesh networking thanks to its promise of low-cost access to broadband services.

Bluetooth 5.0 was officially deployed in 2016 with a focus on enhancing the range, speed and data capacity for the connections. It also had another promising role: IoT connectivity. Where Bluetooth had previously been thought of as a 1-to-1 connection between devices, this concentration on IoT tech allows for the connection of multiple devices and, ultimately, the cloud.

Recent research on disruptive technology by Panasonic shows that many companies have adopted mobile devices, apps and commerce and the cloud, and three in five have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT). Senior tech decision makers believe these technologies are critical to their future success, according to our research. Clearly developments, such as mesh networking, that yield fruitful deployments of disruptive technology are important to these decision makers.

Wide-ranging applications

Bluetooth mesh network represents a major step towards a more accessible and wide-ranging wireless future. It allows for multiple devices to connect to the same network and all communicate seamlessly and in real time. A standard Bluetooth network is similar to a speaker presenting to an audience. The speaker may address the entire audience or individual members and audience members may address a question to the speaker, but audience members don’t communicate among themselves. In a Bluetooth mesh network audience members may address one another. This topology has two advantages. First, since a single message may travel along many routes to its destination, this dramatically increases the probability that the message arrives. The second advantage is the increased distance a message may travel – like one audience member speaking to another.

While standard Bluetooth recently upgraded its range in the Bluetooth 5.0 update, mesh networking hypothetically allows for infinite range if the proper chain links are in place.

Mesh networks in healthcare

There are pioneering Bluetooth mesh network examples in healthcare. Hospitals are using Bluetooth beacons to monitor and track equipment. But helping nurses locate equipment is just the surface of Bluetooth’s capabilities in the health system. Using this tech, doctors and nurses could monitor patients from anywhere, significantly reducing the need for hospital visits. These visits are both costly and potentially dangerous due to the risk of things like contagious diseases and infection. Not only would a doctor or nurse be able to monitor patients wirelessly, but a patient’s devices at home could do things like monitor temperature through biometric sensors and automatically notify the drug store to deliver medicine if the patient got a fever.

Benefits to manufacturing

There are also clear benefits from the Bluetooth mesh network in the manufacturing sector, especially where multiple machines operate simultaneously on the plant floor. Previously, if two devices situated beyond the range of a Bluetooth device needed to communicate, it would require either a wired connection or gateway that could connect to the cloud. This cloud connection requires Wi-Fi, which uses significantly more energy. Now with the mesh network, every single device in the entire factory can connect to each other via Bluetooth, and even the ones farthest away can communicate if necessary by bouncing the signal through other devices on the way.

Bluetooth mesh networking is just one piece of the wireless future that is to come. Read more in our Future of Wireless Everything series. 

Authors
Jeff Howell - President of Panasonic Industrial Devices Sales Company of America