TRB AV Symposium Recap

The 2017 Automated Vehicles Symposium was held in San Francisco, CA, and was a joint conference between the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). The purpose of the symposium is to bring together industry and academia to discuss the latest automated vehicle research and technology. Dr. Lily Elefteriadou, Dr. Sherrilene Classen and UFTI students, Mahmoud Pourmehrab and Patrick Emami, were in attendance.

The conference lasted two days. Keynote speakers gave presentations in the morning, followed by breakout sessions in the afternoon. Poster sessions were held in the evening. UFTI students, Pourmehrab and Emami, presented a poster titled “A Demonstration of Fusing DSRC and Radar for Optimizing Intersection Performance” at the second poster session on July 12, 2017. This poster was co-authored by Emami, Pourmehrab, Dr. Lily Elefteriadou, Dr. Carl Crane and Dr. Sanjay Ranka. Their poster summarized the approach they took to combine data obtained from Directed Short-Range Communication (DSRC) units placed in automated and connected vehicles with radar detections at urban traffic intersections. They showed that by combining the two sources of information, they were able to track automated, connected, and conventional vehicles approaching the intersection. The results included in the poster were from the AVIAN tests at FDOT’s TERL facility in May 2017.

Emami said the following about his experience at the symposium:

“One of the most interesting presentations we attended was by the Toyota Research Institute’s CEO Dr. Gill Pratt. He outlined their dedication to investing in new technologies to help bring automated vehicles to consumers, and even announced Toyota AI Ventures, a new venture capital firm dedicated to providing seed funding and guidance to startups leveraging cutting-edge robotics and artificial intelligence technology.

We also attended other breakout sessions where we learned about projects in academia that are also focused on optimizing the efficiency of traffic intersections by leveraging vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. We learned that there are many different ways of approaching this problem. Something unique about our approach is that we are considering connected, automated, and conventional vehicles in our optimization problem.

We had a great time presenting our poster and received positive feedback and lots of interest. We hope to return next year to present on the progress we have made.”