Page 32 - Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (January 2020)

Sensors

ZF’s OnTraX assist offers further
capabilities with the addition of short-range
radar, including lane change and city drive assist.
ZF
productivity, to increase the safety, that’s going to have An easy thing to describe is platooning. Everybody
value for quite a while. suspects that as we shorten the following distances
with platooning we can increase the fuel savings. When
What’s the timeline for Level 4 autonomy? you shorten the following distances, you need to more
That’s a tough question. Anything that I’d say would tightly control the powertrain. You need knowledge of
be further out than what you hear from Silicon Valley. grade information and stuff like that and feed that into
[Laughter] There’s a lot of work to get this going in the powertrain. It’s a fairly difficult problem to be able
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and there’s going to be to smoothly start and stop these heavily loaded vehicles
even more to get it beyond that into more challenging on a grade, that challenges powertrain control—to have
duty cycles, in snowstorms and rough weather up them in an automated way to back up and very gently
north. But it’ll happen, there’s no doubt it’s going to kiss the loading dock. That requires a lot of control.
happen. It’s just a matt;r of when.
What’s ZF’s position on cameras replacing
What are the challenges to get to L4? exterior mirrors on trucks?
A lot of it is just having the ASIL-qualified sensors, We’d like to do it, for sure. We are working with our
and that brings in redundancy. You can pile a bunch of passenger car people that are involved in the regula-
sensors together that have a lower ASIL [Automotive tory affairs with this action. We think it’d be a good
Safety Integrity Level] to get to what you need for safe- step for the industry to be able to replace the mirrors
ty-critical functions. But that adds expense and that’s not with rearward-looking cameras. It’s maybe a little bit
really an elegant solution. The sensors that really satisfy easier to do in Europe right now based on the regu-
the functional safety requirements, basically it’s lidar, and lation. We’ve got a demo going on with a platooning
the old joke is, it’s two years out and it’s been that way for project over there that actually does exactly this.
the last five. There needs to be some breakthroughs in We’ve got what we call ‘wings’ that come out of the
highly reliable sensing technology to be able to do that. vehicle at the top of the cab, and that’s where we
put the V2V [vehicle-to-vehicle] communication
What’s the role of powertrain in ADAS and between the platooning vehicles and we’ve also got
autonomy? rearward-looking cameras in there. It’s obviously
Powertrain will be increasingly integrated into more something where we’ve got to see regulatory change
complex ADAS functions on the way to autonomy. over here before that can happen. ■

30 January 2020 AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING