NASHVILLE, Tenn. — An engineer with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said advances in vehicle-to-vehicle communications continue to accelerate and that new studies are under way to address several critical and complex issues.
Alrik Svenson, a research engineer with NHTSA’s Office of Vehicle Crash Avoidance and Electronic Controls, said the latest project that just started is designed to develop methods for enabling the tractor to automatically obtain required trailer specification information.
Svenson, speaking to a task force here Feb. 29 at the Technology & Maintenance Council’s annual meeting, said the Department of Transportation has launched a two-year project with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
Svenson said VTTI is tasked with developing “automated methods of determining trailer characteristics” necessary for deploying two-part V2V basic safety messages involving tractor-trailers.
The goal, he said, is a system that has low cost — or no cost — and one that proves “workable” for the trucking industry.
Possible methods could include RFID tags, trailer-based rear-facing cameras and data transmission through telematics devices, Svenson speculated. He said the process of drivers inputting information has been used in field studies, but engineers hope to automate the process.
DOT last year also began a study with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute to analyze cybersecurity.
Svenson said some hackers have been able to take control of passenger vehicles through the “info-tainment system,” and further study on “threats applicable to the heavy-vehicle industry is required.”
See the March 7 print edition for additional coverage.
