Zenzic CAM scale-up: day 3 planning

Eloy’s time in the Zenzic CAM Scale-up is progressing well. After Day 2 at UTAC Millbrook Proving Ground, we left in a very comfortable place in terms of technology robustness and a good indication of the service’s efficacy. For Day 3 we want to be able to test the technology more rigorously and firm up our internal approach to measuring the software’s benefit.

Day 3 will be at a new venue for us; AssuredCAV (HORIBA MIRA). We will have a new road layout to add to the artificial intelligence software for the required training. We are also going to increase the number of vehicles to 20, with 10 going clockwise and 10 going anticlockwise. This will mean more interactions and more complicated AI forecasts. For the first time we will not regard all vehicles as equal, giving the option to prioritise to emergency vehicles and cyclists.

Finally, we will attempt to make the road more complex with less visibility for the professional drivers so they will be unable to see other vehicles approaching from blind bends. More vehicles will make it more complex for a human to determine the best coordination actions too.

Venue: AssuredCAV

We are going to use the perimeter road and city course, with a 1-mile loop for the cars to circle and interact with. The inner road network has 90-degree bends, which can act as a suitable way to create a blind corner with lower driver visibility similar to what we experience on many rural roads. We will be spending far more time preparing the road layout and use the various facades and screening available at the testbed.
HORIBA MIRA City Course

HORIBA MIRA City Course

Coordination with 20 vehicles

We are now starting to scale-up the number of vehicles in our tests, noting that the current world record for linked cooperation is 100 vehicles (we’re hoping to beat this later in 2023!). We will also have a new team of professional drivers to use the software, so some of the smaller modifications we have made will get fresh pairs of eyes for user experience feedback.
Eloy Team

A very cold Eloy team

20 vehicles and at a higher speed (up to 30 mph) will lead to far more interactions across the course, with drivers receiving interaction communications up to every 10 seconds.

Application updates

We are adjusting the app screens to be more integrated as opposed to only showing pop-up messages for drivers. A new multi-vehicle coordination banner will be added to the Eloy Drive SatNav screen, which can be turned on and off by an option within settings. As with most of our services going through R&D, this will be hidden for public users of the Eloy Drive app.

Efficacy testing

After Day 2 we started to see our first efficacy readings, with a 10% journey time improvement.

With a relatively low vehicle and lap count it is too early to use these measurements to make a true assessment. We expect a few key actions to increase the software benefit towards our simulation output of 20%:

  1. The base case lap times will be comparatively higher as cars will meet each other more frequently due to lower visibility on the narrow sections of road. On Day 2, the professional drivers could often see other vehicles on the open track environment we have at testbeds.
  2. When cars meet each other and cause a stoppage, the time cost for this is likely to be higher due to the higher car density (20 cars vs. 10 previously). Traffic jams and delays are directly correlated to car density.
  3. The app-on interventions will be clearer due to the change to a banner, and therefore easier to follow
  4. We will look to increase the vehicle speed on the wider sections to a more realistic level (up from 15mph and towards 30mph). Therefore, the time spent per lap on the narrower sections will be higher and the delays caused on these will be a higher proportion of total lap times. Again, the proportion of narrow road to wider road is a parameter with direct correlation to the intervention benefit – if there are no narrow sections, the software isn’t required.
  5. A new set of professional drivers will be new to the test. We noted that after Day 2 the drivers got far better at organising themselves around the base case, and wanted to beat the software, due to familiarity with testing.

Other items

We are starting to plan our fourth and final testing day back at UTAC Millbrook Proving Ground. This will have more scaled up layouts, blind corners, and our first use case setup for managing traffic towards festivals and events. Please get in touch if you want to follow this planning more closely with Eloy.

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