So, the University of Iowa has a 25 year
history in doing advanced vehicle safety
technologies. And we're at the point now
where we're starting to see the first
generation of University of Iowa
research come into production into
regular vehicles that most people can
afford--cars that cost $20,000, $21,000.
Many of those technologies originally
were studied here at the University of
Iowa. From the undergraduates who start
off literally cleaning cars, cleaning a
Tesla, cleaning a Volvo, that's how we get
to know some of these technologies. When
you're cleaning out a car, and you're
helping mount cameras, and doing some of
that instrumentation, it's really
entering in at the ground level at the
undergraduate ... through the PhD level
student who's doing very advanced
mathematics and theoretical models of
how these vehicles are going to operate
in the future. That
spectrum of experience really begins to
set how our engineers begin to think
about today in the future. So we provide
some really terrific experience for
those students. In the future we're going
to slowly begin to have the car steer
for longer periods of time, brake
completely on its own, and then
eventually take over the driving with
the driver really as a supervisor. So with partnerships that we have in
Sweden--with Chalmers University, Volvo, the Swedish government--where
our students are going to Sweden,
we're hosting faculty from Chalmers
University in Sweden. We're collaborating
on a number of different area. And one
of those includes a Volvo XC90, which we
had before it was in production for
doing testing with drivers on how
this technology works and what kind of
things we can do to tweak it. So when we
take people out in vehicles that have
higher levels of automation first
they're a bit dubious about what a car
can really do, and then once they get to
see what a car feels like and looks like
when it begins to brake by itself and
steer by itself, it's sort of remarkably
unremarkable, in the sense that once that
vehicle starts taking over some of those
functions it's like, "Wow! Really? Is that
it?"
Even though five minutes before they
were like, "Oh wait, there's no way
this is going to be safe." So, I think that
once you experience automation it's sort
of a bit ho-hum because you don't
really think about how boring sometimes
our drives are. We just get into a lane,
we stay in a lane, we change lanes, we put
on the brakes, we accelerate. When you
really sort of think about the function
of what a car is doing in traffic, on one
hand it's very simple and mundane,
on the other it's highly complex in
terms of what you're actually monitoring.
Pedestrians, bicycles, other cars,
that may be running a stop sign or a red
light, you have to watch out for all
those kinds of things.
