US To Drive 3,000 Wi-Fi Linked Vehicles In Massive Crash Avoidance Trial

coondoggie writes "The U.S. Department of Transportation said it will run a massive road test of cars, trucks and buses linked together via WiFi equipment in what the agency says will be the largest test of automated crash avoidance technology to date. The test will be conducted by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and feature mostly volunteer participants whose vehicles have been outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication devices."

Comments

Ann Arbor drivers thinking about dissertations

[ewg]

Ann Arbor is a good place to start, its drivers are too preoccupied with their dissertations to watch the road...

3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[psergiu]

3000 WiFi radios emiting together on how many channels and using what bandwidth ? Even if they drop to 1Mbps and use all 11 US 802.11 2.4Ghz channels, the collisions caused by ~270 devices on the same channell will make that network unuseable.

What about the trolls with a WiFi jammer (like a microwave over with a screwdriver jammed in the door safety switch) ? Turn-it on and watch the pile-ups.

Or will they use all channels in the 802.11n 5Ghz spectrum ?

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Naatach]

..the collisions caused by ~270 devices on the same channell will make that network unuseable.

With that many collisions, that would make the road pretty much unusable too.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Sarten-X]

Because of course the engineers building an automated network aren't aware enough to think about what the car should do if it loses connections to other cars...

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 3000 radios aren't all transmitting to each other. Rather, each one would lower its power to broadcast only to its immediate area, so other cars can avoid it. A jammer would force cars nearby to switch to backup systems, and other vehicles could increase their own transmission power to compensate for the noise.

Also note that though the article uses the term "WiFi", these are likely not standard 802.11 devices. Rather, they are in the 5.9 GHz band, with 75MHz bandwidth.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Baloroth]

These aren't driverless cars. The crash-avoidance system is a supplement to help drivers avoid collision (giving them warnings of incoming cars at intersections, alerts of possible rear end collisions, stuff like that), rather than a replacement for the drivers. In other words, if the system goes down you simply don't get the benefits, which is exactly what we have now anyways.

mostly volunteer?

[a2wflc]

Will they at least tell the non-volunteers that their vehicle has been modified? I hope medical scientists don't pick up this new way of increasing the size of your test group.

link to project page

[Trepidity]

Here is the DOT project page on the experiment, which includes a nice FAQ, and a description of the purpose.

This particular 3,000-vehicle experiment, fwiw, is not intended to test the crash-avoidance technology in a live trial, but rather to collect a data set. The indicators aren't going to be displayed to the drivers on a HUD or anything, but just recorded for analysis, along with vehicle position/telemetry.

surely...

[zmollusc]

...they are using the wrong networking topology? Token ring is the way to go if you don't want collisions .