How to participate in wireless study

The University of Michigan is aiming to turn the entirety of Ann Arbor into a laboratory.

The city's drivers will become lab rats, and each errand or trip to work will become part of a very large experiment.

U-M's Transportation Research Institute and the federal and state transportation departments have plans to equip 9,000 cars with wireless communication technology.

That's an estimated 10 percent of the city's driving population.

The cars will send and receive wireless communications with each other and much of the city's infrastructure, including equipped traffic lights and intersections, as Ann Arborites go through the motions of their daily routine.

A modest percentage of the vehicles will be outfitted with not only the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology, but also the ability to use the wireless systems to alert the driver to danger or traffic.

Devices in each car will store the data, and researchers at U-M will export and analyze the findings. The technology has the potential to lower collision rates and make vehicle transportation a large, interconnected system.

U-M began this research with roughly 2,800 cars in August 2012 after receiving an 18-month grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. USDOT extended the contract by six months and has promised to renew the project, known nationally as the Safety Pilot, for three years when the existing agreement expires in September.

USDOT funded $28 million of the initial $31 million startup cost of the study, and U-M officials expect the federal government to commit upwards of $10 million (but as much as $18 million) for the project's next stage. U-M is looking for industry funding partners to triple the size of the study by 2016.

After that, U-M and the Michigan Department of Transportation want to expand the number of connected cars to 20,000, grow the territory considered to all of Southeast Michigan and install wireless technology in infrastructure along major corridors, such as I-94, I-96, M-75 and M-74.

Although large and ambitious in scope, the safety pilot is just one aspect of a burgeoning surge in automotive research that has occurred in the Ann Arbor area in recent years.

Along with the safety pilot, U-M has launched a Mobility Transportation Center that propelled plans for a $6.5 million test track in northeast Ann Arbor, near North Campus and the old Pfizer complex U-M retrofitted into a hub for interdisciplinary medicine and engineering research and calls the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC).

Though small in size at 30 acres, U-M has big plans for the track, which includes house facades and streetlights and fake parking meters and handicapped signs — all equipped with wireless technology. The school will conduct its own V2V research and autonomous vehicle testing there, but it also wants to entice companies — like the Big Three and other automotive developers — to test their technology at the facility.

Wallbridge, Inc., has announced plans to invest millions — with estimates reaching into the nine figures — into the defunct Willow Run Powertrain Plant in Ypsilanti in order to turn it into a connected vehicle research center and test track for hire. The federal government is likely to require that V2V technology be integrated in new vehicles within the decade, and Wallbridge is hoping to position the plant as hub for regulatory testing.

U-M will build its facility in the next year, while the Willow Run proposal is at least three years in the future.

Meanwhile, in 2013 Toyota announced a $28 million investment in its Ann Arbor Technical Center, where the company develops the engineering design for many of its vehicles and also conducts wireless and autonomous testing. Hyundai in 2012 announced a $15 million expansion to its Washtenaw County technical center, a move that added 50 jobs to the area.

Toyota has been testing driverless vehicle technology on the open road of Ann Arbor for the past two years, and the company regularly takes advantage U-M's nascent "laboratory" of wirelessly connected vehicles and infrastructure in Ann Arbor.

"We do a lot of our own product development, but ultimately we have to have our vehicles talking to vehicles of other manufacturers," said Bruce Brownlee, a senior executive administrator at the Toyota Technical Center. "So collaborative activity is very important, so that we can make sure we are in-sync."

Companies coming in

On a recent weekday Jim Sayer scrolled through his smartphone in his third-floor office in Building 500 of the NCRC.

He ticked off a list of companies he'd met and spoken with that week, each wanting to learn more about the safety pilot project, which he manages. A major foreign car manufacturer. A telecommunications company. A tier-one auto parts supplier. A data services company. Another foreign auto manufacturer.

This list was long, and growing longer.

"We've got people coming in almost daily," he said. "It's nuts right now, in terms of the amount of interest this is generating."

Sayer has led the safety pilot for three years, but he began seeing an uptick in interest in February, after the federal government announced it would eventually require connected vehicle technology in all new automobiles. Not only did the announcement pique the interest of major car manufacturers, but it also spurred wireless communication and security developers to consider the possibilities for aftermarket devices.

"As soon as the USDOT made that commitment ... there was a huge flood of companies that wanted to find out what this is all about," Sayer said.

Yet other regions are also vying to be the next hub of futuristic automotive technology. There is a connected vehicle project in Virginia, and it sits near the regulators who make decisions in Washington, D.C. Texas and Florida, where there is an abundance of sunshine, are also beds of automotive research.

Even those with the most limited knowledge of cars know that Google is testing its diverless vehicles on the open roads of Nevada and California. Silicon Valley on the sunny West Coast is a garden of ideas and talent that sprouts new tech companies with breathless frequency.

Michigan, as a region, is worried the valley will wrest the automobile's future from its birthplace. The Michigan Department of Transportation, car companies and U-M are all making investments to keep the region relevant. The state this year loosened restrictions on autonomous car testing on public roads, hoping to entice companies frustrated with tighter restrictions in other states.

"We are better positioned than any other region in the United States," said Paul Krutko, president of Ann Arbor Spark.

"Now this is an opportunity we could lose if we don't make investments. You can't take this stuff for granted. We've got to build on our strengths. We've got to realize the whole paradigm is changing from the way we have traditionally used and driven cars."

When the major companies like Wallbridge are considering where to build their next facility, people like MDOT director Kirk Steudle want it to be in Michigan. When the U.S. government is considering pouring $70 million into lightweight and modern metals manufacturing, the Big Three — Ford, General Motors, Chrysler — want it to be in Michigan.

Faroog Ibrahim is director of software engineering at Savari Networks, an intelligent transportation systems company based out of Santa Clara, Calif. His company provides technology for the safety pilot study, and Ibrahim works closely with researchers at U-M.

After more than two years of traveling between California and Michigan and doing a lot of work remotely, Savari opened a satellite office in Farmington Hills in February. The office employs five people.

Ibrahim said it wasn't just Savari's existing work with the safety pilot, or the fact that the Big Three call the region home, that drew his company to Southeast Michigan, but also the belief that future automobile innovation would take place in the Midwest.

"Michigan is the home of connected vehicles. The original equipment manufacturers are here. The model deployment is here. The Collision Avoidance Metrics Partnership is here," he said. "That's why we opened here."

The Collision Avoidance Metrics Partnership, or CAMP, is a consortium of eight major automobile manufacturers that work together to share advances in safety technology. In a competitive industry where innovation is usually held close to the chest, CAMP exists to make sure that life-saving innovation — a category in which many engineers classify V2V technology — is shared, within reason.

In the initial stage of the safety pilot, CAMP contributed 64 cars to the study. The eight car manufacturers each contributed eight cars with V2V technology embedded within their operating systems. For the first 18 months, those cars were the heart of the study, and manufacturers are using findings from the study to inform advancements for market vehicles.

As Sayer scrolled through the list of companies visiting U-M, he outlined the pitch he gives when there's an automotive CEO sitting across from him in his office, instead of a reporter.

Companies, he says, look to Ann Arbor because it is the largest test bed in the world for V2V technology.

"We have this unique test facility right in the middle of the city so that companies can come, they can test their systems in a very well controlled, safe environment, and when they're confident it's safe to test on the roads ... there it is: an entire connected city with 9,000 vehicles and devices."

Steudle, the director of MDOT, was attending the Transportation Research Arena conference in France when an autonomous vehicle expert based out of London approached him.

"'You guys are the international lead,'" Steudle recalls the expert saying.

"Michigan is where this research is most developed," he said from Paris, during a phone interview. "My counterparts in [other] states, when we announced what we were doing in vehicle research, they just looked at me and their jaws were on the table. They were thinking 'How are we going to get around them now?' They're jealous of the resources we have, that the automobile manufacturers are right here."

Collaboration

Edwin Olson, in his office inside Building 500, sits side-by-side with Ford engineers. He's part of a Ford-funded Next Generation Project that's developing autonomous vehicles using radar and lidar, a sensor technology that analyzes light to measure distance.

His partnership with Ford is an industry collaboration that U-M wants other researchers to imitate. In fact, much of its Mobility Transformation Center is dependent on industry funding. The school estimates that MTC will infuse Southeast Michigan with $100 million in automotive research, with more than half of that funding coming from industry.

On a warm spring day on NCRC's grounds he points to four sensors on top of the autonomous Ford Focus his team has helped develop and test.

The short, spherical sensors rotate as they analyze the light reflections in the immediate area. Each one costs $30,000. Inside the vehicle is a black box that holds $100,000 worth of radar technology. Where there are normally cup holders near the driver, there is a large red emergency button. Press it and the vehicle stops.

The sensors have a lot of sun and light to work with on this bright, cloudless day. In California there are a thousand days like this one — no rain in the forecast, no snow on the ground. But in Michigan, especially of late, clear days are a commodity — a fact that can make futuristic vehicle research difficult but, in an ironic twist of fate, may well be advantageous to auto developers.

"Weather is one of the really interesting advantages of being in Michigan. The bay area is beautiful. What's the forecast for tomorrow? Beautiful. And the day after that? Beautiful." Olson said. "We have snow. We have rain, sleet, fog, exhaust, clouds. ... One of the challenges we're tackling is how do you make the vehicle robust to these types of conditions."

In the absence of a track, Olson's team tests the vehicle in parking lots outside of Building 500 and in gravel lots on the edge of campus. Like nearly every U-M affiliate who talks about U-M's planned $6.5 million track, Olson highlights that the facility is the first of its kind. By mimicking a real-life driving environment with things like handicapped signs and fire hydrants, the track isn't a clean oval; instead, it's a winding, cluttered lab.

Huei Peng, associate director of the Mobility Transformation Center, says one of the hurdles facing mobility advancement in Southeast Michigan is the secrecy of industry players.

"Auto companies are used to being very competitive," he said. "If you say this is pre-competitive and let's work together to create a laboratory and find out the standard and regulation needs for pushing this forward, sometimes the companies do collaborate with each other, but a lot of times, because of the competitive nature of the industry, they guard against each other and try to keep everything to themselves."

He added: "To a certain extent that's why universities should take the lead pushing something. If we don't come out to push for the pre-compeitive work, and we leave it to them, it will be slower because of the trust issue."

Stephen Forrest retired from his role as vice president of research at U-M in January. Forrest is a physicist who, even in his leadership post, churned out several invention disclosures each year. His goals for the mobility project were just as ambitious as his goals in the lab. When the safety pilot was launched in 2102, one could often hear Forrest saying that he wanted Michigan to become the next Silicon Valley.

For many involved in advanced automotive research, however, there's not so much of a push to mimic Silicon Valley as there is to keep the valley from eclipsing Michigan.

"There is a possibility that the center of mass of autonomous research could move to Silicon Valley if we didn't do something about it," Olson said. "You've got Tesla and Google there. They're high visibility, they're well capitalized and they've got budgets to hire a lot of people."

He added: "The sense of urgency is really built on the idea that they haven't won yet. We have a great research corridor. A little bit of money right now, intelligently invested, could have a huge impact on keeping the center of mass here."

Leadership

Three floors down from Sayer's office are two large, industrial garages. They look like the kind of garages in which mechanics fix mufflers or change oil. Instead, technicians install wireless devices in volunteers' cars, paying each volunteer between $200 and $400 a year to participate in the safety pilot study.

In the garage early in the morning of April 10 was a blue Honda Civic, and a crew of three casually dressed workers were uninstalling V2V devices and front and rear cameras that recorded the driver's view and also the driver's reactions. The Civic's owner had participated in the study for a year and didn't want to be involved anymore.



Dillon Funkhouser, a research associate with the safety pilot, said scientists are still making improvements to the wireless technology. Safety alerts are somewhat unreliable. GPS locaters in the study need to be more accurate.

Funkhouser pointed to two motorcycles at the edge of the garage.

Each had a big, black, simple-looking box mounted near the handlebars. Inside the box were V2V communication systems that could send signals to other wired vehicles. There are six of those in the safety pilot, Funkhouser said. There's one bike, three buses, 16 semi-trucks and 2,800 cars.

In two years, the number of vehicles in the study will, researchers hope, triple, and the technology being tested will become more refined. As that growth occurs, Funkhouser and other administrators of vehicle research at U-M are watching to see if other companies follow Savari's path and open up shop in Michigan.

"There was so much uncertainty initially about whether it would be successful or not," Funkhouser said of the safety pilot, "that I think companies were hesitant to put a lot of investment in it. Now that we've secured three more years of USDOT funding and the Mobility Transportation Center is launching, I would expect that companies will set up development offices here and work in this environment.

That's how we've always conceived this: an economic development opportunity to bring businesses here," he continued.

"It's yet to be seen, though, if that will work."

Kellie Woodhouse covers higher education for the Ann Arbor News. Reach her at kelliewoodhouse@mlive.com and follow her on twitter.