While technology for autonomous vehicles has come a long way, there are still steep hills to climb on the road to improving the reliability, safety and efficiency of self-driving electric vehicles. Dr. Zach Asher, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Energy Efficient and Autonomous Vehicles (EEAV) Lab, has been working with a team of researchers across the country to address these challenges. 

“With the hindsight of 10 years of highly funded development, we now know that software and cameras alone don’t provide an easy solution,” says Asher. 

Western Michigan University is teaming up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to drive solutions from outside the car— through sensors and processing embedded in road infrastructure. The team is placing low-powered sensors in the reflective raised pavement markers that are already used to help drivers identify lanes.

“Our goal is to demonstrate how we can decrease the power consumption of autonomous vehicles with the use of infrastructure sensors and off-site sensor processing,” explains Dr. Nic Brown, senior research associate and executive director of the EEAV Lab. 

In “Development and Evaluation of Chip-Enabled Raised Pavement Markers for Lane Line Detection” in the journal IEEE Sensors, the team explains that microchips inside the markers transmit information to passing cars about the road shape. They are effective even when vehicle cameras or remote laser sensing called LiDAR are unreliable due to fog, snow, glare or other obstructions.

This technology shifts some of the processing load from the car’s software onto infrastructure—
saving electric vehicle battery power and extending its range. Compared with a leading camera and LiDAR-based autonomous driving technology, the chip-enabled pavement markers can reduce navigational power consumption by up to 90%, the team reported in “Vehicle Lateral Offset Estimation Using Infrastructure Information for Reduced Compute Load.”

According to ORNL researcher Dr. Ali Ekti, marker sensors could also eventually convey information about temperature, humidity and traffic volume. 

This project with ORNL is part of a larger project at Western, which is bringing together research and industry partners to develop related sensor and autonomous driving technologies such as radar retro-reflectors, high-definition mapping, computational offloading and weather sensing. WMU researchers are also using a vehicle driving on a closed course to measure the reduction in vehicle energy use enabled by these technologies.

Asher is planning road demonstrations for stakeholders including the Tennessee and Michigan departments of transportation, the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and the city of Chattanooga. Since government agencies decide which technologies are implemented in infrastructure, their involvement in the development process is critical.

The team is now working to commercialize this technology through their start-up company, Revision Autonomy.