‘The future is here’ | Self-driving car to be used for research will be using Racine as its testing ground | Local News

Unveiled Monday outside Gateway Technical College in Racine, there is a vehicle that can drive itself — the product of decades of research and years of collaboration between the city, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering and Gateway Technical College.

The six-seater electric vehicle isn’t allowed for public use and you won’t see it going down Main Street without a human behind the wheel anytime soon.

The Badger, as it has been named, is to be used as a research vehicle to collect data that can inform the creation and implementation of future self-driving cars.

The Badger is a Polaris GEM, a commercially available electric vehicle manufactured in the U.S., but it’s been outfitted with autonomous driving technology from Virginia-based Perrone Robotics. Unlike many other autonomous vehicle companies, Perrone focuses on outfitting other manufacturers’ vehicles with AV technology rather than building their own cars.

“We aren’t like Tesla,” said Colleen Hahn, Perrone Robotics vice president of marketing and communications.

Racine Mayor Cory Mason has been a champion of the project. A UW-Madison graduate, he said during Monday’s event that he connected with his alma mater a few years back about allowing UW to use Racine as a testing ground.

Mason said “this is the first time the City of Racine and UW-Madison have had a partnership like this.”

“The future is here,” stated several of the dignitaries at Monday’s unveiling.

One of Mason’s priorities since taking office in 2017 has been turning Racine into the innovation leader it once was — the city had once been known as the “patent capital of the country.”

“The City of Racine could become a laboratory for this kind of technology,” Mason said, noting Racine’s Smart City designation in 2019.

Gateway President Bryan Albrecht drew a parallel to this history Monday, pointing out how when the college was founded 110 years ago, one of the first things taught there was automobile safety. He then recalled that one of the world’s first automobiles was invented in the City of Racine — the steam-powered “Spark” was constructed by Rev. John Wesley Carhart in Racine and first driven down a road 1873, when legendary automaker Henry Ford was still only 10 years old.

“Moments like this really set a tone for all of us in our historical future,” Albrecht said.

The Badger project as a whole is “mainly designed for research … in a public environment,” Albrecht said in an interview. Gateway students, in partnership with UW-Madison, can take part in the research and in maintaining the electric zero-emissions vehicle through three key areas of study:

• In cybersecurity, since stopping hackers from taking over self-driving cars is a major fear.
• In information technology, in part because self-driving cars “produce extremely large data sets,” Noyce said, and need even more computer power once machine learning gets involved.
• In automotive maintenance, as electric and automatic vehicles still need to be taken care of like conventional vehicles with combustion engines do.

To advance Wisconsin’s economy and infrastructure so it doesn’t fall behind in this century, Department of Transportation Secretary Craig Thompson, who grew up in Racine, said that the state needs “to be more intentional” in its research and implementation of the technologies that may define our lives in the decades to come — from using self-driving technology to reduce the number of truckers needed to transport goods (which could alleviate shortages in America’s supply chain) to improving safety.

Joseph Holmes, global business development vice president of Perrone Robotics, said that the company believes its work will actually create more jobs rather than simply replace pre-existing ones. Perrone is “enhancing the future jobs in this industry … we’re going to need to move people,” Holmes said. “We’re not looking to replace mass transit. We’re just trying to fill that gap.”

Regarding safety, “this sort of tech can have an immense effect on injuries and fatalities,” Thompson said. He said that in 2021, there have been 488 traffic deaths in Wisconsin. He claimed automated vehicles could get that number to zero.

How could technology eliminate traffic accidents? Mason gave the following example: Three AVs driving the same way down a street and all three are connected to the same network; if the car in front has to slam on the brakes because someone walked into the road, the two cars behind it could hit the brakes simultaneously, rather than relying on humans’ reaction speed to prevent a pile-up.

Eventually, industry leaders say there will be immense networks of roadways and vehicles communicating constantly to get people and things where they need to go faster and safely.

“We continue to work on these types of technologies,” said Dr. David Noyce, an engineering professor at UW-Madison who, according to his bio on the college’s website, has “spent the last 20 years working with full-scale driving simulation and studying driver comprehension and behavior related to various traffic control devices, geometric designs, operational conditions, and new technologies.“

The city hopes that, someday, The Badger could be used for on-demand transit for people who don’t have cars or can’t drive to get to appointments or go to the grocery store.

“It’s not part of our transit system. We are not yet at that point. The goal is to get there someday,” Mason said, while noting that “you’ll see it on city streets” soon as part of the research.

“I want you all to rest assured: Safety will always be the No. 1 issue. We’re going to be at the forefront of safe operating procedures,” Noyce said. “This testing is going to take some time. We’re going to do it right. We’re not going to put the vehicle on the roadway until it’s ready.”

One of the biggest hurdles? Driving in the snow. While many AV programs appear to be safer than humans driving in perfect conditions, they often fail during the inclement weather events that Wisconsinites are accustomed to.

When it is on the road currently, manual takeover will always be possible, Noyce said.

When will steering wheels go away?

In 2016, Lyft Founder/President John Zimmer predicted self-driving cars would “all but” put an end to personal car ownership by 2025. That predication now appears rather too ambitious, but self-driving cars are most assuredly coming. Google, Tesla and other tech giants — as well as established vehicle manufacturers like Toyota, Audi, Volvo, General Motors, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz — are well on their way to having working models, or have working prototypes all ready, even if they aren’t fully street legal.

Since late 2016, all Tesla cars have had self-driving hardware built-in; they just need software updates to be ready to go.

However, Noyce said, it may begin getting harder to buy a new vehicle that isn’t self-driving within a decade.

There are still glitches.

While The Badger is street legal, it can be rather slow.

When members of the media and local leaders were given rides, the operator had to drive the vehicle to a starting point.

Then, the operator had to take several minutes to activate the self-driving technology followed by the car getting its bearings before taking off down the road — almost silently, like all other electric vehicles. Its braking was a little choppy and turns were slow, but there were no real issues.

The steering wheel turned all on its own, with the operator from Perrone keeping his hands off the wheel and his feet off the pedals.

He did explain that the guidelines for driving an AV are that your hands remain free to take the wheel if necessary, and your foot should be over whichever pedal is more likely to be used at any given moment — over the brake on busy city streets, for example, or over the accelerator when driving on a wide open interstate — in case the driver needs to take over at a moment’s notice.

The route it took went from Gateway’s parking lot, south along Pershing Park Drive for about a block, looped through the parking lot at Samuel Myers Park, and then back to where it started.

Hahn said that Perrone employees were on site Sunday mapping out the route to plug into the computer. Had they taken more than 24 hours to work out the kinks on the route, she said it would’ve been a smoother ride.