Autonomous cars were once seen as part of an unlikely future. But developments by companies such as Google and Tesla mean this future could be just four years away.
But while American companies are well into trials for autonomous cars, in Australia, the first driverless vehicle was tested on public roads late last year.
As Australia continues developing the vehicles, Arup is also working on a policy framework and looking at how driverless cars will impact on cities, the flow-on effect to car parking and even road surfacing.
“Therefore, what are the kinds of safety things that need to be thought about in terms of not just how they move along but how can they be hijacked or cyber security issues associated with that?” said Greg Stone, head of digital services – Australasia at Arup.
“That’s an urban planning issue as much as it is an engineering one, so there is a very multidisciplinary approach to the policy. Then of course you’ve got all the engineering considerations.”
While it appears other countries are racing ahead of Australia, Stone said each country will have its own journey and be influenced by different factors.
“I don’t think we’re at a point where we can say there’s an arms race and so-and-so is technically ahead of someone else,” he said.
One factor influencing Australia’s development of driverless cars will be our appetite for innovation, according to Stone, and whether the vehicles are seen as important to our economic development. But Stone conceded that the US embraces innovation more and takes more risks.
“That in itself is probably going to help them advance the state of driverless cars a lot more quickly,” he said.
Developing a policy framework for autonomous cars is just part of the work Arup carries out in it’s digital studio, which was established around three years ago and currently includes 20 staff members working on user interaction design, data management, visualisations and digital planning.
“Businesses like Apple are now trying to understand what they want as experiences and then personalise those. That’s been something that’s been growing very much out of much of the IT world, social software and things like Facebook and Twitter,” Stone said.
This is also happening in more traditional industries, such as the built environment, and growing expectations for companies to complement their existing offering. For example, how clients and stakeholders communicate with each other on projects that can sometimes last several years.
This is where Arup’s digital studios come in to help facilitate that process using digital technology, such as visualisations.
Stone said the unit has worked with government departments, such as Transport NSW, and is also working on other long-term projects.
“At a very simple level, we’ve done a number of web projects that allow us to create visualisations of all the data of those projects and then make them available on the web,” Stone said. Arup is also helping clients to design for the future and imagining what kind of requirements will be needed.
“Our contention is that many of the developments that are currently being designed or built right now will not meet the expectations of stakeholders, certainly post-2020. Therefore there’s going to be a big market wake-up as a result of that,” Stone said.
Stone suggested one reason for this was because facilities such as lifts, air-conditioning and fans are contracted out separately, so they lack integration.
“(Current buildings are) designed for last century’s requirements around an industrial age company or a industrial age retail environment. They’re not designed to be able to meet the sorts of things that people are going to want down the track,” he said.
“There are silos of technology integration, but they’re not available beyond that.”
Stone attributed this to traditional systems that are “managed and monetised by companies that have a vested interest in maintaining control over that vertical integration.”
“You don’t want to integrate that with anyone else and share that sensitive data because it’s not in your best interests to do that. So I think that’s a really big driver.”
But Stone, who was previously Microsoft’s chief technology officer and is trained as an architect, is looking to turn that around and push suppliers to be more open with their data.
“That’s something that we’re driving harder than anybody else to get change,” he said. “I see digital disruption as this massive thing that is happening in every industry.”