The Future of Mobility: Addressing the Challenges of Connected and Automated Vehicles

About the Event

This webinar featured presentations on connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) from two contributors to our Future of Mobility series.

Mechanical engineering professor Rajesh Rajamani discussed the challenges for CAVs on winter roads—and potential strategies for addressing them. Companies like Tesla, Waymo and Uber have held out the promise that future cars will operate entirely automatically, without requiring any driver engagement. However, the industry has focused on developing and demonstrating CAVs in sunny-weather locations such as California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Very little testing and deployment has occurred in states with significant winter/snow seasons.

Raphael Stern, assistant professor of civil, environmental, and geo- engineering, explored the risk of cyberattacks on CAVs. While CAVs offer the potential for substantial improvements in efficiency and safety, they also introduce the potential risk of malicious actors compromising vehicle security using cyberattacks. Some particularly damaging cyberattacks may be easy to detect; other attacks may be more stealthy in nature, yet still result in significant disruption.

The event also featured updates on CAV-related research at the U's MnCAV Ecosystem from CTS Associate Director Gina Baas and the latest CAV activities at MnDOT's Connected and Automated Vehicles Office from Thomas Johnson-Kaiser.

The webinar was held in conjunction with a meeting of the CTS Transportation Safety and Mobility Research Council.

Event Materials

• Watch the webinar recording

Speakers

Rajesh Rajamani is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and associate director (research) of the Minnesota Robotics Institute at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include intelligent transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, sensors, and control system design. Rajamani has co-authored more than 170 refereed journal papers, a co-inventor on 17 patents/ patent applications, and the author of Vehicle Dynamics and Control. He is a fellow of ASME and has been a recipient of the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Ralph Teetor Award from SAE, the O. Hugo Schuck Award from the American Automatic Control Council, and a number of best paper awards from journals and conferences.

Raphael Stern is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in the area of transportation cyber-physical systems, specifically how they relate to vehicle automation and smart infrastructure. He is particularly interested in the modeling and control of traffic flow using autonomous vehicles as Lagrangian actuators in the flow and the possibility of next-generation traffic state estimation using sensors on vehicles embedded in the flow.

Credit

Attendees are eligible for Professional Development Hours (PDHs) and American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) maintenance credits.

More Information

Please contact Samantha Hahn-Douville at snhahn@umn.edu.