Qualcomm Tests New Technology That Could Aid Self-Driving Cars

July 27, 2020 at 10:36 AM PDT

Speaker 1: 00:00 Speaker 2: 00:32 Speaker 1: 01:13 Speaker 2: 01:17 Speaker 1: 01:59 Speaker 2: 02:07 Speaker 1: 03:00 Speaker 2: 03:06 Speaker 1: 03:11 Speaker 2: 03:17 Speaker 1: 04:21 Speaker 2: 04:33 Speaker 1: 05:25 Speaker 2: 05:28 Speaker 1: 06:09 Speaker 2: 06:20 Speaker 1: 07:07 Speaker 2: 07:21 Speaker 1: 08:09 Speaker 2: 08:14 If we're ever going to have self driving cars, they will need to be able to talk wirelessly to one another and a roadside monitoring infrastructure like traffic signals, such technology has been around, but as failed to take hold. Now, Qualcomm is out to prove the effectiveness of a new version of technology that connects cars, union Tribune, technology reporter. Mike Freeman joins me to discuss this pilot project. Mike, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. We'll start with what the goal is here. Why do we need cars to be able to communicate as they roll along the roadways? It's a safety issue, right? And it can enhance safety, um, significantly if cars can peer to peer speak to each other and know some information about, you know, nearby vehicles. And so you can imagine a scenario where, you know, you're going to turn right in an intersection, you're looking back to your left. You can't really see what's going on over there. There's a tree in the way or a big truck. Um, so instead of, you know, just kind of edging out and going, you could get a notification that, Hey, there's a vehicle approaching and it's approaching, you know, a pretty fast speed. Boom. It's like show up on your dashboard. So that's the type of thing, you know, in the future that you could do with this sort of, of technology, it's mostly a safety feature. You've got a mirror everywhere, so you can see what's there. Or even if you can't see it, Actually. Yeah. And, and, you know, marketing, see some of these futuristic dashboards, like I've gone to the consumer electronics show, you know, for several years and you go over to Qualcomm's headquarters and you know, there'll be a dashboard where the normal instruments that you would think on a dashboard are right in front of you, right over the wheels. But on either side of that, there's a camera, right? So you can get like videos, small Canterbury video feeds of your blind spots, basically coming off of the sensors in the vehicle. And those cameras also could hook up to this kind of peer to peer sort of, um, technology where, you know, you could get a video feed off of a traffic light camera that could help you see around say a blind corner. Okay. And that brings me to the specifics of Qualcomm's new, a cellular vehicle to everything technology, what will it specifically do? Well, it, it it's just that it, it connects cars to cars and they call it vehicle to everything because then it can also connect cars to infrastructure like traffic lights, or traffic monitoring devices. Um, other things you might not be able to think of just yet. And it's, um, you know, it's direct it's peer to peer, so it goes, boom, boom. It doesn't rely on the cellular network. Um, you know, it doesn't have to go back to the main tower and then back down to the car. So the idea is, you know, it improves latency, so it can be fast and, and, and the transmissions can be fascinating to do any sort of autonomous driving again. They need that. Um, and then, you know, the it's reliability range, you know, performance, that's the type of thing that they're actually going to be testing out here in San Diego and elsewhere. And it has the, a distinctively Unsexy name of C V to X. If I'm saying that right, It's such a technology thing, right. If they can make it hard, Got to work on the branding there at some point now, where is this going to be tested specifically here in San Diego? So it's, it's going to be on a, there's a three mile corridor off the eight Oh five, um, you know, between state, route 52 and the eight Oh five. And it's gonna, they're gonna put up some boxes there. Um, they almost looked like wifi routers actually, you know, they're just little boxes within tennis that are alongside the roadway. And then I think Caltrans vehicles are gonna have a plugin to their telematics units, all cars today have these little telematics units where you basically get software updates and they read the cars, you know, what's going on. And that's why you get notifications that say, Hey, you gotta go into, you know, for maintenance now and things like that. So, you know, they can plug that in and you have to have the technology, right. It's gotta be in the infrastructure or the other car, and then in, in the car vehicle itself and other vehicle. So then, uh, you know, they will run it. And I think this is, this is mostly a bare bones test. You know, we're testing range, we're testing reliability, we're testing latency, and we're testing for the data we can get off of it to see if there's anything, you know, we can actually use for traffic management. Oh, I see. Now, so we don't really know, it's not going to be sophisticated enough. This test is, sounds like to talk about the safety benefits of the technology. In other words, you didn't hit that pedestrian because we warned you. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, this is like a foundational test. I see. Um, but, but we can obviously talk about the safety benefits of technology. Cause that's kind of where, where the meat of this stuff is. And it's always fun to look ahead with technology. So, you know, the safety benefits again, are, are significant in terms of like notifications of, you know, cars approaching. You can get blindsided notifications, you can do things like, you know, it could come up to a construction zone and you could actually get it at some point and, and notification of like where the workers are. Right? So you're gradually, you're going through a construction zone. There's a lot, a lot happening, but then, you know, boom, you're in the area where there's actual work going on and there's actual people, you know, nearby, you could get like a notification of that, um, just on from these roadside pinks to the car. So that's, that's the type of thing you can do, Bicyclists people that might be hazards in the road And, and that's even farther in the future because at some point in time, they want to embed this technology in the phone and in like smartwatches. So if I'm, if I'm riding my bicycle and it has, you know, CV to X in my smartwatch that I'm wearing and the car has CV to X technology, you know, the car, you could get a morning in the car bicycle approaching 700 feet. That would be the type of SAP technology. And that's kind thing that might flash on the dashboard, right? Boom, you get lonely, like a little one of those little yellow diamond narrows that says bicycle project. So yeah, that's a type of futuristic things that they may be for this technology And Qualcomm hopes to establish [inaudible] as the standard wireless communication system for vehicles everywhere. I would imagine the sun's pretty lucrative. That's Possibly it could be yes, but it's a standard. So there wouldn't be others also making this technology if it's adopted, but this is the standard that China has decided to go with. There is another standard DSRC dedicated, short range communication it's been around for a long time. Um, but it never really took off. And so, you know, this is the CBD X has kind of a better mouse trap for that. Um, and they're hoping they build enough volume and interest among, you know, infrastructure vendors, you know, like stoplight makers, traffic managers, and that sort of thing. And car manufacturers to actually get this, you know, deployed and adopted. It's going to be a little bit, um, but that's, that's kind of where they, they hope that this, uh, this goes Well, that leads me to my next question. The wireless communication technology. It sounds rather basic as we describe it in the overall scheme to switch to autonomous vehicles, where are we with that? Is that much farther down the road. So to speak than many people realize I don't know about that. I, you know, it's the autonomous vehicle technology is actually coming along pretty fast and Qualcomm has a full on advanced driver assist and autonomous vehicle program itself. And they occasionally you'll see them testing, um, you know, cars, a block off a lane of say, you know, state 94 or something like that and do a bunch of autonomous driving tests. So, I mean, I think that's still working and that's still in the works, but this would be kind of an it's an adjunct, but an adjacent safety feature, additional safety feature that I think that'd be deployed probably a lot sooner if it caught on if auto makers decided to do it. And if infrastructure mailers decided to do it, they could catch on a lot quicker than, you know, you might see full on autonomous driving, Speaking with reporter Mike Freeman who covers technology for the San Diego union Tribune. Thanks Mike. Thanks Mark. I appreciate it.

By KPBS Public Media

If we’re ever going to have self-driving cars, they will need to be able to talk wirelessly to one another … and to roadside monitoring infrastructure, like traffic signals. Such technology has been around but has failed to take hold. Now Qualcomm is out to prove the effectiveness of a new version of technology that connects cars.