Envisioning the future of public lighting through upcoming technologies by citizen-centered design

Outdoor lighting forms an essential component of public infrastructure in global urban context. The functions of street lighting have been the same for a long time. Currently, adaptive lighting is used within intelligent lighting systems that are tested for wide deployment. Adaptive lighting is a sensor-based system that uses LED technology to dim and brighten lighting on the streets depending on its context and movement on the streets. The benefits of the technology include, for example, the reduction of energy consumption, light pollution and disturbance of circadian rhythms of animals and plants. This new technology and its deployment have its concerns. Testing the impact of such a public lighting within the major cities in multiple contexts is complex. While urban technologies affect the everyday lives of people, involving them in shaping such a future public infrastructure and widening its application through participation is far from simple. Within the scope of my research, I wish to address enabling citizens’ participation in the visioning of future technologies that may have an impact on public lighting. Therefore, I chose to frame adaptive lighting of smart cities in the context of three future technologies, of autonomous cars, Li-Fi and battery storage. Autonomous cars could change the way we see the role of the public lighting of roads. With Li-Fi, cars could communicate with street lights accessing sensor data from the environment. Household batteries could be connected to street lighting grid and cities could rent storage or buy energy produced by private infrastructure. With these upcoming technologies, changes in the role of outdoor public lighting can be anticipated. I wish to highlight this reflexive relation between changing urban technologies and present a potential for citizen participation in shaping their urban environments. By using design procedures, I engaged with city officials and citizens in creating future urban visions for adaptive lighting and its interaction with three future technologies.Katuvalaistus muodostaa tärkeän osan julkista infrastruktuuria maailmanlaajuisesti. Katuvalot ovat pitkään pysyneet samankaltaisina toiminnoiltaan. Mukautuva valaistus on nykyään laajamittaisesti testattu ja käytetty teknologia älykkäissä valaistusjärjestelmissä, joka on sensoreja käyttävä teknologia, jossa LED valoja himmennetään ja kirkastetaan kadulla tapahtuvan liikenteen tai kontekstin mukaan. Teknologian hyötyjä ovat muun muassa energian kulutuksen ja valosaasteen vähentäminen ja pienemmät vaikutukset eläinten ja kasvien vuorokausirytmeihin. Tällä uudella teknologialla ja sen käyttöönotolla on myös haasteensa. Teknologian vaikutuksien testaaminen suurissa kaupungeissa eri konteksteissaan on monimutkaista, vaikka urbaanit teknologiat tulevat vaikuttamaan suoraan ihmisten päivittäiseen elämään. Pyrin mahdollistamaan asukkaiden osallistamisen tulevaisuuden katuvalaistuksen visioinnissa. Myös muilla tulevaisuuden teknologioilla on vaikutusta tulevaisuuden katuvalaistukseen. Tutkimuksen laajuuden rajoissa otettiin huomioon kolme muuta tulevaisuuden teknologiaa. Tutkin tulevaisuuden älykästä katuvalaistusta itseohjautuvien autojen, valoa käyttävän kommunikaatioteknologian Li-Fi:n ja energia varastojen kontekstissa. Itseohjautuvat autot voivat muuttaa käsitystä siitä, miten näemme valaistuksen roolin teillä. Autot voisivat kommunikoida toistensa kanssa Li-Fi:n avulla saaden sensoreiden tuottamaa dataa ympäristöstään. Kotitalouksien akut voisivat olla yhdistettynä katuvalaistusverkkoon ja kaupungit voisivat vuokrata varastoja tai ostaa energiaa, joka on tuotettu yksityisesti. Näiden tulevaisuuden teknologioiden avulla voidaan ennakoida katuvalaistuksen roolin muutosta. Pyrin korostamaan tätä heijastavaa suhdetta muuttuvien urbaanien teknologioiden välillä ja esittämään potentiaalin asukkaiden osallistamisessa kaupunkiympäristöä muodostaessa. Osallistin kaupungin toimihenkilöitä käyttäen muotoilumenetelmiä luoden tulevaisuuden visioita älykkäästä valaistuksesta ja tämän vuorovaikutuksesta kolmen tulevaisuuden teknologian välillä. Katuvalaistuksen toimintojen visiointiin käytettiin asukkaiden kanssa osallistavia muotoilumenetelmiä

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Achieving dynamic road traffic management by distributed risk estimation in vehicular networks

In this thesis I develop a model for a dynamic and fine-grained approach to traffic management based around the concept of a risk limit: an acceptable or allowable level of accident risk which vehicles must not exceed. Using a vehicular network to exchange risk data, vehicles calculate their current level of accident risk and determine their behaviour in a distributed fashion in order to meet this limit. I conduct experimental investigations to determine the effectiveness of this model, showing that it is possible to achieve gains in road system utility in terms of average vehicle speed and overall throughput whilst maintaining the accident rate. I also extend this model to include risk-aware link choice and social link choice, in which vehicles make routing decisions based on both their own utility and the utility of following vehicles. I develop a coupled risk estimation algorithm in which vehicles use not only their own risk calculations but also estimates received from neighbouring vehicles in order to arrive at a final risk value. I then analyse the performance of this algorithm in terms of its convergence rate and bandwidth usage and examine how to manage the particular characteristics of a vehicular ad-hoc network, such as its dynamic topology and high node mobility. I then implement a variable-rate beaconing scheme to provide a trade-off between risk estimate error and network resource usage

A Survey on Remote Operation of Road Vehicles

In recent years, the use of remote operation has been proposed as a bridge towards driverless mobility by providing human assistance remotely when an automated driving system finds a situation that is ambiguous and requires input from a remote operator. The remote operation of road vehicles has also been proposed as a way to enable drivers to operate vehicles from safer and more comfortable locations. While commercial solutions for remote operation exist, remaining challenges are being tackled by the research community, who is continuously testing and validating the feasibility of deploying remote operation of road vehicles on public roads. These tests range from the technological scope to social aspects such as acceptability and usability that affect human performance. This survey presents a compilation of works that approach the remote operation of road vehicles. We start by describing the basic architecture of remote operation systems and classify their modes of operation depending on the level of human intervention. We use this classification to organize and present recent and relevant work on the field from industry and academia. Finally, we identify the challenges in the deployment of remote operation systems in the technological, regulatory, and commercial scopes

Robotic autonomous systems for earthmoving equipment operating in volatile conditions and teaming capacity: a survey

Abstract There has been an increasing interest in the application of robotic autonomous systems (RASs) for construction and mining, particularly the use of RAS technologies to respond to the emergent issues for earthmoving equipment operating in volatile environments and for the need of multiplatform cooperation. Researchers and practitioners are in need of techniques and developments to deal with these challenges. To address this topic for earthmoving automation, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of significant contributions and recent advances, as reported in the literature, databases of professional societies, and technical documentation from the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). In dealing with volatile environments, advances in sensing, communication and software, data analytics, as well as self-driving technologies can be made to work reliably and have drastically increased safety. It is envisaged that an automated earthmoving site within this decade will manifest the collaboration of bulldozers, graders, and excavators to undertake ground-based tasks without operators behind the cabin controls; in some cases, the machines will be without cabins. It is worth for relevant small- and medium-sized enterprises developing their products to meet the market demands in this area. The study also discusses on future directions for research and development to provide green solutions to earthmoving.</jats:p

Energy-Efficient and Semi-automated Truck Platooning

This open access book presents research and evaluation results of the Austrian flagship project “Connecting Austria,” illustrating the wide range of research needs and questions that arise when semi-automated truck platooning is deployed in Austria. The work presented is introduced in the context of work in similar research areas around the world. This interdisciplinary research effort considers aspects of engineering, road-vehicle and infrastructure technologies, traffic management and optimization, traffic safety, and psychology, as well as potential economic effects. The book’s broad perspective means that readers interested in current and state-of-the-art methods and techniques for the realization of semi-automated driving and with either an engineering background or with a less technical background gain a comprehensive picture of this important subject. The contributors address many questions such as: Which maneuvers does a platoon typically have to carry out, and how? How can platoons be integrated seamlessly in the traffic flow without becoming an obstacle to individual road users? What trade-offs between system information (sensors, communication effort, etc.) and efficiency are realistic? How can intersections be passed by a platoon in an intelligent fashion? Consideration of diverse disciplines and highlighting their meaning for semi-automated truck platooning, together with the highlighting of necessary research and evaluation patterns to address such a broad task scientifically, makes Energy-Efficient and Semi-automated Truck Platooning a unique contribution with methods that can be extended and adapted beyond the geographical area of the research reported

Safety-critical scenarios and virtual testing procedures for automated cars at road intersections

This thesis addresses the problem of road intersection safety with regard to a mixed population of automated vehicles and non-automated road users. The work derives and evaluates safety-critical scenarios at road junctions, which can pose a particular safety problem involving automated cars. A simulation and evaluation framework for car-to-car accidents is presented and demonstrated, which allows examining the safety performance of automated driving systems within those scenarios. Given the recent advancements in automated driving functions, one of the main challenges is safe and efficient operation in complex traffic situations such as road junctions. There is a need for comprehensive testing, either in virtual testing environments or on real-world test tracks. Since it is unrealistic to cover all possible combinations of traffic situations and environment conditions, the challenge is to find the key driving situations to be evaluated at junctions. Against this background, a novel method to derive critical pre-crash scenarios from historical car accident data is presented. It employs k-medoids to cluster historical junction crash data into distinct partitions and then applies the association rules algorithm to each cluster to specify the driving scenarios in more detail. The dataset used consists of 1,056 junction crashes in the UK, which were exported from the in-depth On-the-Spot database. The study resulted in thirteen crash clusters for T-junctions, and six crash clusters for crossroads. Association rules revealed common crash characteristics, which were the basis for the scenario descriptions. As a follow-up to the scenario generation, the thesis further presents a novel, modular framework to transfer the derived collision scenarios to a sub-microscopic traffic simulation environment. The software CarMaker is used with MATLAB/Simulink to simulate realistic models of vehicles, sensors and road environments and is combined with an advanced Monte Carlo method to obtain a representative set of parameter combinations. The analysis of different safety performance indicators computed from the simulation outputs reveals collision and near-miss probabilities for selected scenarios. The usefulness and applicability of the simulation and evaluation framework is demonstrated for a selected junction scenario, where the safety performance of different in-vehicle collision avoidance systems is studied. The results show that the number of collisions and conflicts were reduced to a tenth when adding a crossing and turning assistant to a basic forward collision avoidance system. Due to its modular architecture, the presented framework can be adapted to the individual needs of future users and may be enhanced with customised simulation models. Ultimately, the thesis leads to more efficient workflows when virtually testing automated driving at intersections, as a complement to field operational tests on public roads