NIST Researchers Hold an Automated Vehicle Research Day
Credit: ctl
On Thursday Sept 26, 2024, NIST held its first Automated Vehicle (AV) Research Day as an internal celebration of NIST research in automated driving. The morning session included an opening address by Charles Romine, NIST Associate Director for Laboratory Programs, followed by invited presentations by Cem Hatipoglu, NHTSA Associate Administrator for Vehicle Safety Research, and Ed Straub, SAE Director of Ground Vehicle Automation.
Cem Hatipoglu outlined the NHTSA safety mission and the challenges in relating driving automation research to actual on-road safety. Ed Straub shared SAE’s present and future efforts toward standardization of driving automation technologies.
Following the presentations, NIST AV researchers showcased their projects in a poster session covering the topics of Sensing and Perception, Artificial Intelligence, and Communications. The Sensing and Perception team described work on measuring aspects of lidar camera fusion like calibration and colored point clouds. The AI team discussed object detection and classification precision, based on uncertainty measures, and shared experimental results demonstrating the variation in precision resulting from these driving conditions. The Communications team described a framework for assessing the added safety benefit of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to safety-critical maneuvers and presented NIST capabilities in running experiments using V2X hardware and simulated vehicle networks. An additional poster was presented by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), an external partner of NIST in AV research, that highlighted their physical test track for on-road testing.
AV Research Day closed with on-road demonstrations with the NIST-instrumented “development mule vehicle” on the NIST Gaithersburg campus, with rigorous attention to safety. There were demonstrations for all three topic areas of sensing and perception, AI, and communications which were followed by attendee “ride-alongs” using the vehicle.
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