Dr Shladover’s talk focuses on the importance of connectivity of vehicles (vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure) in order for automation to have favorable, rather than unfavorable, impacts on traffic congestion, smoothness, safety and energy/environmental impacts. Consideration of the technical challenges in safety assurance and perception lead to conservative estimates for the introduction time of highly automated vehicles. The challenges vary for automation systems with different levels of capability in different operational design domains.

Dr. Steven Shladover has been researching road vehicle automation systems for 45 years, beginning with his masters and doctoral theses at M.I.T. He was the Program Manager, Mobility at the California PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology) Program of the Institute of Transportation Studies of the University of California at Berkeley until his retirement in November 2017. He led PATH’s pioneering research on automated highway systems, including its participation in the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium, and has continued research on fully and partially automated vehicle systems since then. This work has included definition of operating concepts, modeling of automated system operations and benefits, and design, development and testing of full-scale prototype vehicle systems. His target applications have included cooperative adaptive cruise control, automated truck platoons, automated buses and fully-automated vehicles in an automated highway system.