The invention of the automotive vehicle has shown life-changing effects on several levels, especially in urban landscapes. This automotive revolution led to the reshaping of cities and their infrastructure centricity. Now, as we live in the fourth industrial revolution, cities are driving the transition to the age of autonomous transportation and will be transformed by it.

The Definition of Autonomous Vehicle

a vehicle that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to detect its surroundings and model its environment to plot a safe driving path without the need of a human monitor so it can reach anywhere a traditional car reaches and do whatever an experienced driver does.

Do Autonomous Vehicles Have Issues in Terms of Safety?

We have mentioned that autonomous vehicles are able to perform all driving tasks without the need for human attention or interaction. Although they have the potential to reduce accidents, like any experienced driver, they might face corner cases, such as blind spots that there is currently no way to manage without the help of intelligent infrastructure and harsh weather conditions, which would reduce the functionality and safety of these vehicles by producing unclear sensor data.

Autonomous Vehicle’s Blind Spot vs. Automotive Vehicle’s Blind Spot

For automotive vehicles, blind spots can be defined as the areas around the vehicle that are not directly visible from the rear and side mirrors, so they need extra effort to be seen by the driver. They also consist of areas that are not visible because of the body of the vehicle itself which includes pillars that are used to join its top and body.

Like automotive vehicles, autonomous vehicles also have blind spot issues. They use sensors to detect surroundings and this detection is improved by increasing the number of sensors. Hence the blind spot area depends on the number of sensors used which increases the cost of the vehicle.

The Definition of Smart Roads

Smart roads are a component of the intelligent infrastructure which is essential for the smart cities concept. They apply advanced information technologies, such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, to facilitate the planning, construction, management, and services of smart cities.

Smart roads consist of the actual roads themselves, smart street lights, smart traffic signs, smart sensors, and autonomous vehicles driving on them.

Why Do Autonomous Vehicles Work Safely on Smart Roads?

Smart roads collect data about the local environment and share it immediately with vehicles, thereby eliminating blind spots and otherwise extending perception in obvious ways. The infrastructure also processes data from its sensors and from the vehicle's sensors to extract and produce what is called semantic data. Semantic data might identify an object, for example, as a pedestrian, and locate that pedestrian on a map. After that, the results are sent to the cloud, where more elaborate processing combines semantic data with data from other sources to generate global perception and planning information. The cloud then dispatches global traffic information, navigation plans, and control commands to the vehicles.

That information combined with data from weather services feeds into a distributed computing system that uses artificial intelligence to construct a single model of the environment that can recognize static objects along the road as well as objects that are moving along the path to ensure the efficacy of vehicles even during bad weather conditions, which will necessarily help prevent most accidents and traffic jams problems that road transport have been suffering from since the introduction of automotive vehicles.

The Effect of Smart Roads on Autonomous Vehicles Cost

Putting a lot of the intelligence into the infrastructure will also lower the cost of autonomous vehicles, as the infrastructure becomes more powerful, it will be possible to transfer more of the computational workload from the vehicles to the roads. Therefore, autonomous vehicles will need to be equipped with only basic perception and control capabilities, which will reduce the cost of autonomous vehicles by more than half.

Intelligent Integration!

Combining smart roads and autonomous vehicles will lead to an integrated, fully intelligent transportation system that will reach unparalleled levels of safety and efficiency by utilizing the huge amount of combined information and its prominent level of accuracy.