As the Director of CIRRUS by Panasonic, Rob leads a dynamic team of personnel who develop and deploy connected vehicle technology. In his career, Rob has served in a variety of engineering and lead roles on transportation projects for a diverse set of public and private sector clients. This included leading development of the first On-Board Unit System Requirements and integrating the first OBU and RoadSide Unit (RSU) for the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium.
We recently asked Rob to share his perspective on the promise of connected vehicle technology, the challenges the industry faces, and how he ended up wedged in the trunk of an experimental Ford Mustang testing the world’s first connected vehicle OBU.
I was involved in project called the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium, or VIIC. It was a group of about 30 companies – automotive manufacturers, hardware, software, cloud computing, and more. We had a warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, that we turned into a garage, and Ford gave us the test Mustang.
Our goal was to see if 5.9 GHz spectrum technology would work for connected vehicles. There were about six of us on my team, I was the systems engineer. We had a giant OBU in the trunk, trying to send signals to a RSU. Nothing was working, and it was my job to figure out why.
I was isolating elements and testing, and eventually we got to the point where messages were being sent from the vehicle, but nothing was getting received at the RSU. The signal was supposed to reach 300 meters for the test, but we couldn’t get it. We kept moving the RSU closer and closer – five meters, nope. One meter, nope. Finally, I took the RSU off its tripod and laid it on the roof of the car with its antenna almost touching the OBU antenna. Then the comms went through. The data looked like gobbledygook because it was encoded, and it was inches, not meters, but it worked!
Maybe a month later were able to communicate over five meters, which was a big improvement. At that time we were testing Basic Safety Messages (BSM) and Traveler Information Messages (TIM). Eventually the large VIIC project ended, and development was then spread over multiple USDOT projects.
Of course, now we can communicate much greater than 300 meters. And I’ve been excited to see reliability and security aspects grow to the point where we can add security to any device. Now we are starting to see effective use cases demonstrated in the field.
Figure 1: The legendary Ford Mustang and North America’s first (and largest) on-board unit testing V2X technology (photo courtesy of Rob Zimmer).
But we are still in a chicken-and-egg situation of who will deploy first: The infrastructure owner-operators, or the automotive OEMs. I’m surprised that hasn’t been resolved by now. Both sides seem interested, and both are doing good work, but nobody has really committed to deploying at scale.
There are IOO leaders – Utah, Georgia, Florida, Maricopa County, and Ohio stand out – but there’s an ebb and flow with the OEMs. They’re still waiting for that killer app to appear that will really drive sales of the vehicles if they add connectivity.
I believe connected vehicles and automated vehicles are a symbiotic pair. Autonomy will give us the ability to improve safety and reliability on roadways, and connectivity turns a transportation system into a system of systems. AVs and human drivers will be more aware of what’s happening six cars in front, for example, or two miles in front.
The future is that CV allows insights into the whole traffic roadway and system, autonomy will manage command and control, and the combination will create efficiency. For example, we will see close-in driving, so several cars can occupy less road space than with human drivers. We will have safer braking, acceleration, and awareness of roadway hazards like potholes, construction, and stalled vehicles.
Personally, my litmus test for success is when my mother calls me to ask how she can get an OBU in her car. My mom is into technology, and she pays attention. When she sees vehicle connectivity in the world and asks if I can help her get in, then I know we are there.