Page 30 - Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (January 2020)

Sensors

Next-gen Sensors

Advancing Commercial-

Vehicle ADAS, Autonomy

ZF’s director of ADAS & Autonomy says the supplier will be very well positioned in 2020 for the
SAE Level 2 market, which he views as “a real sweet spot” for commercial vehicles.

by Ryan Gehm

Together with its many partners, ZF supplies ZF is working on both highly automated “revolu-
camera and radar technology and advanced compo- tionary” systems and on “evolutionary” driver-assis-
nents for both the passenger car and truck markets, tance systems that are increasingly complex, he noted,
the latter being especially suited for the move to more citing the supplier’s OnTraX lane keep assist that will
complex driver-assistance systems, according to launch in 2020 with its first major OEM customer.
Dan Williams, director of ADAS & Autonomy. “The Williams spoke with SAE’s Truck & Off-Highway
business case in commercial vehicle for reduction in Engineering the recent NACV Show in Atlanta. He’s
driver hours of service, fuel cost reduction and safety scheduled to participate in a Commercial Vehicle
have strong economic incentives to adopt ADAS/auto- Safety technical session at the SAE Government/
mated driving technology,” he said. “Additionally, the Industry Meeting, January 22-24, in Washington, DC.
regulations placed on the industry will require our
customers to utilize certain solutions.” Which industry will lead with the integration of
automation systems?
Dan Williams, One very reasonable prospect might be passenger car,
director of ADAS which has a lot of scale and a lot of money to invest in
& Autonomy at ZF. R&D that’s definitely required for these very expensive
systems to develop. But passenger car has their own
problems—they’ve got very diverse and sometimes very
complicated duty cycles, or we’d say operational design
domains…The opposite extreme is off-highway, like
with automated mining trucks and other [machines]
in remote areas. All of these off-highway examples are
very low volume, very particular to a given site—they
require a lot of engineering without much volume. We
would say that commercial vehicles are kind of the
Goldilocks scenario for automation, where things are
just right. There’s more concentrated commercial-ve-
hicle activity in fewer specific use cases that are more
simply automated. Two-thirds of our vehicles spend
more than 95% of their time going straight down the
highway at the speed limit, maintaining the lane. I don’t
ZF want to undersell that—that’s still a very difficult thing

28 January 2020 AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING