Aussie roads face autonomous challenges

The organisation representing road transport and traffic agencies throughout Australia and New Zealand has released a study into the state of readiness for autonomous vehicles – and the outlook isn't great.

Austroads, a body overseeing 900,000km of roads collectively worth more than $250 billion, is committed to maintaining and enhancing a road network that will be safer and more efficient into the future. That, by implication, means ensuring autonomous vehicles will be capable of effectively navigating those roads safely.

An audit conducted by Austroads, culminating in five reports, deals with the specification for the road audit, a call for a national assets standard for roads, emerging technology to be implemented for the support of autonomous vehicles, and the project's findings and recommendations.

“The project involved an extensive road audit that assessed how well vehicle machine vision systems could interpret more than eight million line segments and 8000 signs on a 25,000 km sample of the Australasian road network,” said John Wall, Program Manager, Future Vehicles and Technology, Austroads.

“This followed on from a review of available literature and engaging with local and international industry stakeholders to become better informed on the latest technology and standards for automated vehicles worldwide.

“We also interviewed road agencies and found the single most important factor preventing them from updating detailed asset standards to reflect the needs of automated vehicles was the lack of clear guidance."

Recommendations from Austroads include:
• Adding edge lines, lane lines and centrelines to roads that do not have them,
• Ensuring the lines contrast with the road surface and are regularly maintained,
• Revising electronic speed signs so they can be easily interpreted by machine vision systems.

According to Wall, “most freeways and highways of Australia and New Zealand can support Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, such as lane-keeping assistance”.

But the Austroads exec sounds a note of caution where more advanced vehicles are concerned.

“Achieving readiness for more highly automated driving will require a combination of smarter vehicles, changes to infrastructure, and improved infrastructure operations and maintenance practices.”

Austroads welcomes members of the general public with an interest in the subject to take part in a free webinar on November 7. Follow this link to register .