NOT JUST ANOTHER ELECTRIC CAR

Uniti engineers are nothing if not passionate. Their constantly updated YouTube videos, all in the name of transparency, exude a passion usually reserved for CrossFit enthusiasts.

Uniti is a Swedish start-up crammed with tech-savvy engineers who have decided to enter the hyper-competitive world of electric cars. Partners are Siemens, robotics firm KUKA energy group E.ON. Uniti brings to the table a near-evangelical fervour that is reminiscent of Apple in the early days. Listening to Lewis Horne, Uniti’s Australian-born ceo, you can hear echoes of a young Elon Musk. His tone is informal, impassioned and driven – an entrepreneur’s tone, the sound of someone on a mission.

Steering unit in the Uniti car.

Uniti’s two-seater electric car is defined by its human-centric design and its focus on the battery, a removable auxiliary system, which enables flexible charging. The vehicle is a light-weight (450 kilograms) and can reach speeds of up to 130 km/h. It has a futuristic heads-up display to allow for more focus on the road, and the steering unit could be from something out of Star Wars. This detail extends to its skf double row deep grove ball bearing for the door-hinge assembly.

Uniti engineers like to see themselves as game changers, bringing a breath of fresh air to an old market. If they manage to maintain the drive they have today, who knows where the road may take them?

PLATOONING A STEP CLOSER

One hour west of Stockholm, on a frosty but bright and sunny morning, four articulated trucks pull up onto a disused runway and come to a halt. All the trucks have drivers, but not all the drivers are driving. Today the runway is operating as the test site for Scania’s latest semi-autonomous truck platooning trial.

Scania believes that a sustainable transport future will be a reality through the use of multiple solutions. Platooning is one solution and may be one of the most effective ways to optimise logistics, transport flows and systems.

Up to date innovations

Platooning involves the use of smart technology and the most up to date innovations in autonomous vehicle technology.

Gunnar Tornmalm, Head of Pre-development Automation

On today’s test track, the vehicles drive together in one unbroken line. Each vehicle is, to the casual observer, simply driving one after the other. Gunnar Tornmalm, Head of Pre-development Automation, explains the reality of the situation. The first vehicle, he explains, is the ‘lead’ and the driver is the only driver driving manually. Christoffer Norén, a Development Engineer and one of Tornmalm’s team, sits in the third truck.

Norén is very pleased with the technology: “It was very relaxing giving control to the system,” he says.

Slipstream benefits

The system uses wireless communication so the trucks can follow the leader at a close distance in a safe and efficient manner. All the trucks which follow the lead truck benefit from the slipstream created.

During the test, to further show the robust nature of the system, Tornmalm drives an ‘intruder’ vehicle. This shows how the trucks adjust when a car drives between them. The trucks automatically create a gap into which the vehicle can drive and then when it leaves they automatically make up the gap again. Brake tests are also conducted to show the effective response of the system when the lead vehicle brakes. Once the braking action is communicated to them, the following trucks respond instantaneously.

A step closer to public highways

During the trials the technology proves to be effective. It not only assists the four trucks to operate as one in a steady semi-autonomous platoon, but is also shows that it is ready to tackle unplanned, real-life, interruptions. These tests show how ready the system is for public road testing. Each test takes platooning a step closer to public highways.

“I would like to see pilot tests on a larger scale on public roads in three years,” Tornmalm says.

The continued success of the trials, and the benefits that platooning can bring to logistics, as well as the overall sustainable nature of the system, strongly suggests that Tornmalm may well soon see the system in full operation.

Platooning in brief

Platooning is a method that allows vehicles to travel in close formation on the road thereby increasing road capacity. Scania has been developing the technology for several years and is well positioned at the forefront of autonomous vehicle research and development to take platooning to the next level.

— Reporting for camera (interviews) and written content for Scania.com

THE ALGORITHM AT THE HEART OF AUTONOMOUS TRUCK SAFETY

In their work at the department of Automatic Control, Professor Bo Wahlberg and Ph.D. student Pedro Lima are dedicated to achieving one thing above all else: safety.
If autonomous trucks are going to become part of our everyday lives, they are going to be the safest trucks ever created.

Many accidents we see on the roads today are caused by what is known as 'pilot-induced oscillation', which Professor Wahlberg says “is ultimately due to the fear induced in the driver in a dangerous situation, causing them to overact or overcompensate”.

But a well-designed algorithm doesn’t react like that; it computes what needs to be done and reacts accordingly, causing an autonomous or self-driving vehicle to continue safely on its way. And it’s this that Wahlberg and his team at the Department of Automatic Control are focused on creating. However, working towards such an algorithm hasn’t been easy, and Wahlberg says that it would have been impossible to develop even five years ago.

“We just didn’t have the computational power. The ideas are not completely new, but the ability was not there.”

Doctoral student Pedro Lima agrees: “What we are using is Model Predictive Control (MPC), and that is not a new concept. It actually existed as early as the 1960s, but running a complicated optimisation algorithm this fast wouldn’t have been possible before, without today’s computers.”

Lima is a fervent advocate of automated driving technology. He explains his motivation with a stark statistic.

“This week I attended a conference where I learned that 1.2 million people die every year due to road accidents. That’s like a jumbo jet falling from the sky every half a day,” he says, still genuinely shocked by what he has heard. Despite this disturbing picture he is far from despairing because of the possibilities offered by the project he is working on. “In the future people will look back and say ‘how on earth did people actually drive a car?’ It’s so dangerous,” he says.

Automatic Control and safe transport

The Department of Automatic Control at KTH is a busy place, befitting the fact that automation is one of the hottest research subjects going, and also a much-anticipated technology by consumers and industry alike. Along with his colleague Assistant Professor Jonas Mårtensson, Professor Wahlberg supervises Lima’s research, which focuses specifically on control algorithms of heavy-duty construction trucks, and he has spent the past four years working on Model Predictive Control (MPC).  “Using MPC a truck can stay on a narrow, winding road and drive itself smoothly,” Wahlberg says. 

Lima adds, “The model can predict the vehicle's movements in any given situation, on the basis of information about what direction it's being steered in, how much throttle is given and alternatively how much braking force is applied.”

In the work, a lot of effort has been expended on developing the truck’s control algorithm so that it is as accurate and reliable as possible, but achieving this with a heavy truck is no mean feat. With much greater mass and much more built-in inertia than passenger cars, trucks present a greater challenge for autonomous driving technology. 

When it comes to automated vehicles in general, the question of safety is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, but there is a significant cultural mindset to overcome: many of us are scared to let go of the steering wheel.

However, Wahlberg says that this is all a matter of public perception. Lima’s work notes that figures for 2012 from the USA’s national highway safety administration (NHTSA) showed that 94% of accidents are caused by driver error. Indeed, the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that road traffic injuries will be the third greatest cause of disabilities by 2020. Yet, despite those statistics the public are still wary of autonomous vehicles, preferring to have humans in control.

How automated trucks can make mines safer

The project ‘iQMatic’, led by KTH partner Scania AB, has the objective of developing a fully autonomous truck for mining operations by 2018. Pedro Lima spends roughly twenty percent of his time working with Scania at its research and development department in Södertälje, where he is developing the ‘essential controller’.

“The essential controller is a way to automatically control the steering, gas and brakes,” Lima explains. He adds that he likes to focus on the steering most of all, and the Model Predictive Control technology makes it possible to minimise deviations from the driverless vehicle’s intended path. The MPC also maximises passenger comfort by reducing involuntary side-to-side movement in the steering, acceleration and braking, while finally maximising the vehicle's fuel efficiency. The team is focused on ensuring that the automated vehicle drives as smoothly and as safely as possible.

Tests so far have impressed professional drivers. The prototype, ‘Astator’, travelled softly and stably around a track at Scania’s testing area in Södertälje, achieving its maximum speed of 90 km/h. The algorithm smoothes the drive by taking in new information every 50 milliseconds, causing it to make the vehicle steer, accelerate and brake correctly.

The Global Positioning System (GPS), LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges) and multiple cameras all make an autonomous truck much more aware of its situation and position than a conventional unautomated truck with an unassisted driver. This awareness, allied to an ability to automatically assess and correct direction, speed and braking ensures that the trucks of the future will be very much safer alternatives to the vehicles currently in use.

By 2018 we are highly likely to see autonomous trucks working in mining environments in what will be highly controlled situations. When automated vehicles are used in mines, it is most likely that people will be placed in separate control towers overseeing the larger picture and giving the vehicle its tasks; that means the risk to people working at an often busy mine would be greatly reduced. This will be a great step forward in increasing the safety of mineworkers.

Though automated vehicle technology is still developing, Bo Wahlberg is already certain about the improvements in safety that it will bring.

“Although we cannot be sure of what the future holds beyond the mines and more controlled environments, we are sure that Model Predictive Control has the ability to bring not only advances in general vehicle autonomy but also in road safety overall.”

WHERE THE FUTURE LIES

KTH Royal Institute of Technology has served as one of Europe’s key centres of innovation and intellectual talent for almost two hundred years. Recognised as Sweden’s most prestigious technical university, KTH is also the country’s oldest and largest. Education and research spans from natural sciences to all the branches of engineering and includes architecture, industrial management and urban planning.

In 2016 I wrote the research articles for the yearbooks for both the School of Electrical Engineering and for the School of Industrial Management.

School of Electrical Engineering articles:

• Independent communication between robots
• Automising stem cell research
• The algorithm at the heart of automated truck safety
• 'Human organs on a chip' technology
• Sustainable power development