Introduction
On January 11, 2021, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued the “Comprehensive Plan for Automated Driving Systems” report (referred to as the “Comprehensive Plan”), which is an extension and implementation of the U.S. “Automated Driving 4.0” national plan, aimed at ensuring its global leadership position in automated driving, and further clarifying the three major goals, five priority areas, and three public platforms for the development of the U.S. automated driving industry.
Companies such as Google Waymo and General Motors Cruise have already obtained fully autonomous driving licenses, and the development of the U.S. automated driving industry is now moving from purely accumulating quantity to making qualitative leaps. The United States is the most developed country in the world in terms of new generation information technology. As a national strategy for the development of the U.S. automated driving industry, the Comprehensive Plan can provide guidelines for China’s development of automated driving technology and promotion of the national strategy for smart vehicle innovation.
The “Comprehensive Plan” expounds the policy propositions of the U.S. automated driving industry
Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation has published an annual national policy report to promote the development of the automated driving industry, focusing on issues such as automated driving technology, safety, privacy protection, and leadership, in order to accelerate the improvement of industry policies. This year’s “Comprehensive Plan” is the implementation of the national plan “Automated Driving 4.0” in ten major principles, such as safety first, ensuring privacy and data security, and the U.S. government believes that innovation must be strengthened in order to maintain a leading position in the field of automated driving.
As a result, the main policy propositions for the development of the U.S. automated driving industry were proposed by the U.S. government: three major goals, five priority development areas, and three public application platforms.
Clarify three major goals
First, establish mechanisms to promote industry collaboration and information transparency: Establish industry alliances to track new technologies and trends in the development of automated driving vehicles; issue national policy guidelines to guide the direction of the industry and enterprises; hold industry seminars to promote information sharing; and disclose information on automated driving vehicle testing and the implementation of automated driving trucks to increase public awareness and transparency.
Second, optimize the traffic regulatory environment. First, simplify the administrative exemption process. The transportation department promotes the testing and pilot demonstrations of automated driving technology through authorization and other forms. For example, under reliable technical conditions, vehicles that do not comply with current automobile safety standards are allowed to operate on the road and can be commercially deployed for automated driving within a certain range. Temporary exemptions are granted for low-speed unmanned small trucks. Second, modify existing regulations. Strongly support innovation, including allowing optional or modified braking, steering and other vehicle components for automated driving vehicles, researching vehicle safety regulations, and revising provisions that hinder the development of automated driving to accelerate the testing and commercialization of automated driving vehicles.The third priority is the construction of a traffic system suitable for autonomous driving. The transformation of the existing traffic system, commercial evaluation of autonomous vehicles, analysis of traffic regulations and the applicability of autonomous driving technology, and research in areas such as autonomous heavy trucks in ports. In addition, the “Highly Automated Vehicle Research and Development Program” will be established by the central government to provide funding support for technology research and pilot demonstrations. In 2019, the program provided $60 million in federal funding for eight projects in the United States.
Five priority development areas
Autonomous driving technology integrates new-generation information technologies such as visual computing, the Internet of Things, and satellite positioning systems. In specific fields or scenarios, accelerating the application of autonomous driving technology can stimulate corporate innovation and form industrial driving forces, ultimately promoting the commercial deployment of fully driverless cars. The five priority development areas are as follows:
First, low-speed unmanned small trucks. Achieve high-level (level 4 and above) autonomous driving of low-speed small trucks (speed below 25 mph; total weight below 3000 pounds) in a restricted area; Second, low-level autonomous driving passenger cars. In low-risk driving environments such as urban commuting, implement Level 3 autonomous driving of passenger cars; Third, high-level autonomous driving passenger cars. In restricted areas such as highways, implement Level 4 autonomous driving of passenger cars; Fourth, long-distance autonomous driving trucks on highways. Level 4 autonomous driving vehicles that can change lanes on highway ramps, especially suitable for inter-state long-distance transportation; Fifth, low-speed shuttle buses. Development of Level 4 autonomous driving low-speed shuttle buses (speed not exceeding 25 mph) for the “last mile” of residents’ travel needs for public transportation connections.
Construction of three types of public platforms for autonomous driving applications
First, the CARMA system established by the US federal government as a public cloud service platform in the transportation field. It uses open-source software design to achieve vehicle-road cooperation and provides real-time information through cloud services. Second, the development and testing platform that supports vehicle-road cooperation can attract scientific research institutes and enterprises to collaborate and innovate with prototype development and testing under the condition of protecting developers’ intellectual property rights through distributed virtual form. Third, the shared system of traffic safety data information is used to analyze the safety of autonomous driving vehicles.
Problems faced by the development of intelligent connected vehicles in China
The revision of relevant policies and regulations lags behind the needs of autonomous driving technology advancement.The US government has been promoting legal revisions through forms such as “licenses” and “waivers”. In 2018, unmanned vehicles for commercial use were allowed. In 2020, automatic driving vehicles were allowed to be operated without manual control devices (including steering wheels) through waivers. Due to the continuous iteration of autonomous driving technology, the related industries and national standards in China are responding slowly, which restricts the development of autonomous driving technology in our country. For example, unmanned driving vehicles are not allowed on the road and must be equipped with a human safety officer in the car. Although automatic driving taxis have been approved for carrying out human testing, they are not allowed to charge fees. In particular, in the field of information security such as vehicle networking, China’s laws are still blank.
There are many intelligent connected vehicle testing bases in China, but there are simple application levels and repeated construction. The United States has carried out commercial services such as automatic driving taxi and logistics vehicles in many places, and the industrial application promotion speed is faster than that in China. The application level of autonomous driving in China is not high. At present, it is mainly in the stage of automatic driving human testing, and only small-scale unmanned testing is carried out in closed venues such as ports and industrial parks. As of the end of 2020, 11 national-level intelligent connected vehicle demonstration zones and 2 national-level vehicle networking pilot zones have been established in China, and more provincial and municipal-level testing areas have been constructed. Except for the testing roads in Beijing and Shanghai which are open for 699.58 kilometers and 559.87 kilometers respectively, other cities have insufficient testing road openings and there is still a certain gap between actual road use scenes.
There are problems with simple and repeated construction of public platforms. Each province and city promotes the construction of intelligent connected vehicle demonstration zones. A large number of public service platforms have been constructed around data exchange, standards and testing and evaluation, etc. The enthusiasm for construction is high, but there are problems such as low platform compatibility and closed system data. There are still problems with public platforms: electronic maps cannot achieve high-precision surveying and positioning due to relevant surveying and mapping policies and regulations; public information such as accidents and road construction held by transportation departments cannot be effectively docked with public platforms, resulting in information sedimentation and insufficient development and utilization.
Policy recommendations:
- Regulatory departments should form a joint force to increase top-level design and overall coordination. The intelligent connected vehicle involves various departments such as development and reform, industry and information technology, transportation, and housing construction. China has formulated relevant policies such as the national innovation development strategy for intelligent vehicles. However, in the implementation stage, the various departments have not established a coordinated management mechanism for overall coordination, which cannot effectively manage the implementation of automatic driving vehicles from production to usage stages. It is recommended to follow the relevant practices of “inter-ministerial joint conference on energy conservation and new energy vehicles” and other support for the development of new energy vehicles, coordinate the supervisory departments in the fields of vehicle networking, automatic driving, and smart transportation, establish inter-departmental coordination mechanism, and form joint force to effectively promote road testing, demonstration application, vehicle-road integrated infrastructure, 5G vehicle networking, and other work, and overall coordination and development.
- Accelerate the progress of the industry and open up commercial policies for unmanned driving.To deepen the testing of intelligent networked cars, conduct in-depth industry research, and shorten the process of automatic driving industry in China, it can be seen that the application of intelligent networked cars in China has the foundation of catching up with and surpassing the current global leading unmanned driving companies such as Baidu and TuSimple also have their main research and development bases built domestically. Therefore, considering that the development conditions for China’s automatic driving applications have been established, regulatory revisions should be accelerated to allow for “unmanned and unsupervised” testing and to promote the commercial operation of unmanned driving in the taxi and truck fields. In addition, to address the problem of simple and duplicate construction of existing testing areas, we should strengthen the current situation summary, promote the upgrade of application scenarios and commercial operation.
Supporting the Development of Information Systems and Promoting the Construction of Public Service Platforms
The development of car-road integration and the realization of the synergy of car-road-cloud-network are the foundation of intelligent networked cars, and information system construction is the key. Drawing on the advanced experience of the United States in public service cloud platforms, research and development testing collaborative innovation, and information security, we should coordinate the construction of public service platforms.
Firstly, the car-controlled car computing platform should be developed, supporting companies such as Huawei and Horizon to cooperate in developing car operating systems and car chips, and supporting the deployment of real-time embedded operating systems in cars through the “Core High Base” major special projects. Secondly, the cloud-controlled basic platform should collect, store, and analyze dynamic basic data on vehicle operation, infrastructure, traffic environment, and traffic management, and achieve the system connection of existing traffic data (traditional data) and external data (Internet data, third-party data, etc.). Thirdly, the high-precision electronic map basic platform should promote the map data collection capability of high-precision map companies such as NavInfo, develop the standard specification for automatic driving maps, research and develop the basic common technology for generating and applying automatic driving dynamic basic maps, accelerate road information surveying and mapping, and provide basic guarantees for the development of the intelligent networked car industry.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.