Virginia Tech’s Smart Road is a driving force in autonomous vehicle research

A lot of innovations have rolled off the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s Smart Road since its 2001 dedication.

The road — envisioned to advance vehicle technology and safety research via thousands of miles worth of testing — has helped map out automatic emergency braking, advanced cruise control systems, lane-keep assistance, hands-free steering and more.

With maintenance from the Virginia Department of Transportation, which built the Smart Road, and input from 14 automobile manufacturers and 100 sponsors, the project envisioned in 1989 has grown both in miles of roadway and impact to driver experiences. The original road, along with others that Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has developed, is a key setting for the autonomous vehicles to come. 

Tom Dingus, who retired in 2020 after 24 years in charge of the institute known as VTTI, said he did not envision its impact when he took the job. He said that Ray Pethtel, the former VDOT commissioner who was the institute’s interim director when Dingus came on board, told him that they would generate $100 million worth of research from the Smart Road.

“In probably three or four more years, we will cross $1 billion,” Dingus said. “So that’s 10 times the amount [expected] at the time. I thought $100 million was a very tall order.”

Riding the Smart Road

Why did the buck cross the Smart Road? Apparently not to make time with the doe on the other side. That doe stood impassively one day late last year, as a VW wagon passed her and the buck — who had scrambled in front of the wagon, right past her and into the woods beyond.

Does a rafter of gobblers ever cross the Smart Road? Hard to tell, as the turkeys on site hang back near its terminus, relatively wary of traffic.

And what of Steve, standing still at the roadside while rain pours down on a sunny day? He’s a mannequin, placed there for testing, and the rain is dropping from towers high above him, spraying water for road testing.

These scenes arose at the Smart Road’s Montgomery County site. The original 2.2-mile highway simulator’s conception dates to 1999, a year after Virginia Tech established the body that would become VTTI. The Smart Road now runs more than 12 miles and includes a rural road and a street designed to mimic both urban and suburban settings. Road connectors allow vehicles to move from those controlled testing environments onto U.S. 460 business lanes in Blacksburg. 

VDOT built the roads, with the urban and rural versions finished in 2020, and maintains it all.

A transportation institute spokesman commandeered the VW for a Smart Road tour. The wagon was full of cameras facing forward, rear and at multiple points inside, along with other sensors, to record what the institute calls naturalistic driving data. 

“Sometimes we’ll change it up depending on what they’re studying,” VTTI spokesman Eric Holbrook said. “But a lot of that is just to keep an eye on the driver. It’s amazing how quickly you forget that these are in here. We study how people behave when they’re driving, whether it’s distracted by infotainment — which is messing with your air conditioner, changing the radio station … texting and things like that.”

Holbrook declined to specify what sort of testing was going on the day that Cardinal News came to visit, but it obviously involved rain and a pedestrian, possibly stranded. Steve is one of multiple mannequins and inflatables that VTTI uses in its Smart Road tests.

“He’s actually remote-control, so we can see how autonomous vehicles react to a human being,” Holbrook said. “He’s got robotics, so his arms move. His legs do, too.” 

He’s not super fragile.

“If Steve takes a hit, you can velcro him back together, which is why we prefer to use him.”

That day, he didn’t need repairs, but his raincoat was handy. A strong rain was pouring from several of the 75 towers that stand roadside and can create rain, fog and even snow (if the temperature is less than 30 degrees). The water comes from a 500,000-gallon, VTTI-owned tank fed from Blacksburg water. 

The system can produce up to 3 three inches per hour during about three hours’ time, though most studies require less flow and a longer duration, according to Holbrook. It can also make up to 2 inches of snow, using about 660 gallons per minute, though the institute once produced a larger snowfall using 4,700 gallons per minute. 

VTTI has another 13 moveable weather towers.  

Steve stood on a base that VTTI also uses for other mannequins and inflatables. In addition to Steve, the institute’s collection includes a bicycle rider, a motorcycle, an inflatable deer and a child pedestrian, Holbrook said.

When the actual deer ran in front of the VW — it wasn’t even a close call, by the way — Holbrook called it in. It happened on the Smart Road’s rural section, but wildlife hangs around the highway roadbed as well.

“When we’re out doing tours or research — it is wilderness out here, as you see — we do occasionally have deer,” he said. “There’s been a bear or two out here, and we have to let the control tower know that there’s animal sightings, because this is a 65 miles per hour, graded road, and the last thing you want to do is have a deer out there.”

Another section of the Smart Road features shipping containers and other objects that researchers use to simulate buildings and such things as bus stops and four-way traffic stops, with a modular setup that can be moved around depending on whether the work centers on inner city or suburban environments. 

“Working with VDOT and partners, there’s brilliant people that work here and they just all work together and figure out what they need,” Holbrook said. 

The institute’s research and data gathering includes crash injury studies and has led to laws against phone use while driving. By 2010, VTTI was the world’s leading expert in transportation data, according to the institute’s website.

In 2017, VTTI launched the Automated Mobility Partnership, dedicated to advancing automated driving systems. Two years later, the U.S. Department of Transportation granted the institute $15 million for research on integrating autonomous vehicles onto the nation’s roads.

Late last year, VTTI demonstrated its autonomous Ford F-150 in the Washington metro area. The pickup truck, with a man sitting in the driver’s seat but only barely making contact with the steering wheel, navigated multiple highway emergency scenarios, even pulling over for a police stop, a VTTI video showed.

Bot is my co-pilot

VTTI selected Zac Doerzaph in 2021 to follow Dingus as executive director. The year prior, the institute had added an automation hub to the Smart Road in Blacksburg. Big things are coming on the automation front, but Doerzaph believes in slow-rolling it. The key is public acceptance.

To get that, a lot of validation and verification is required to make sure that automated vehicles are safer than humans behind the wheel, he said.

“Today we lose 40,000 people every year on our roadways, which is just just a horrifically bad toll,” said Doerzaph, who has been at Virginia Tech and VTTI for 23 years. “Over your lifetime, millions of people are going to die on the roadways, essentially. And, you know, you’re only lucky if you’re not counted among them. …

“I see automation as the single greatest new tool that we have to make a significant impact on it. So it’s an incredible opportunity. But there’s a but, and it’s a really big but — we have to do it in a way that we build public acceptance, and the greatest way to build public acceptance is to show not tell. And so we need to have success stories that are, to the greatest extent practical, not marred by small failures in between.”

Recent autonomous vehicle crashes — two late last year in San Francisco led Chevrolet to pull its entire fleet of Cruze robo-taxis — worried Doerzaph. A robo-taxi going through a green light did not yield to a fire engine with lights and sirens on, while a human driver caused the second crash, also at a stoplight intersection. Those crashes happened within two hours of each other.

“I think public acceptance is generally, when measured, trending in the negative direction rather than positive,” Doerzaph said. “Of course, crashes are happening every day that are caused by humans. They’re not on the news … Every time an automated vehicle is involved in a crash, it’s front-page kind of stuff. So that’s a difficult place for us to work within.

“But it’s also the reality of where we are, which means, you know, being very transparent, walking, crawling, then running … making sure the industry is thinking collectively, because it’s easy to fall into the trap of competing, and one never should compete on safety.”

The autonomous F-150, painted in Hokie colors, is strictly a research tool, not something built to go to market, Doerzaph said. The truck, in addition to stopping for a police officer’s blue lights, navigated work zones and a tow truck pickup, the video showed.

Virginia Tech and VDOT joined forces on the project with an Australian company called Transurban and the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership. The latter consists of manufacturers Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan.

Among the technologies that VTTI contributed were sensors attached to the stop/slow paddles that road construction crews use to control traffic. Devices attached to the paddles can communicate with vehicles, which is particularly helpful if such aspects as sunlight obstruct a vehicle camera’s ability to “see” the sign, Doerzaph said.

The F-150 information has been summarized and will be published in a series of reports in the next couple of months and eventually will be publicly available, he said.

From all the recent automation innovations, automated electronic braking stands out most for Doerzaph. It’s available in many vehicles already on the market, and should be in all of them soon, he said. 

“What does that well is when the human, for whatever reason, doesn’t realize that there’s something in front of them and they’re going to crash into the car … [the automation] brakes to its full capability. That’s an amazing co-pilot, you know, by far the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

“And already there’s enough data out there that we’re seeing positive impacts from it. As those systems proliferate … you can expand it from A to B [for] things like automated swerve and lane-change assist. …Those are what I see as the biggest near-term enabler to really start to chip away at the safety problem. Not that we don’t have stuff to work on human drivers. We do. That’s certainly part of it as well.”