LBS

ITU devising ‘Driving Test’ for the AI ‘Drivers’

A new ITU Focus Group on ‘AI for autonomous and assisted driving’ will work towards the establishment of international standards to monitor and assess the performance of the AI ‘Drivers’ steering automated vehicles. The group is open to all interested parties. Building public trust in automated vehicles will be the prerequisite to their success in reducing the 1.3 million deaths on our roads each year. The Focus Group’s primary objective is to validate that the driving behaviour of automated vehicles presents evidence to justify this public trust.

The motivations for the project were first elaborated at the third edition of the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, 28-31 May 2019, where discussions led by ADA highlighted the public expectation that AI Drivers should be held to the same legal standards as human drivers.The original Turing Test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The proposed Turing Test for the road could become the basis for an International Driving Permit for AI. The right hold to this permit would be assessed continuously, based on the AI Driver’s behavioural performance on the road. www.itu.int

HERE joins 5G automotive association

HERE Technologies has announced its membership of the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA), a global, cross-industry organization of automotive, technology and telecommunications companies working together to develop end-to-end solutions for future mobility and transportation services.

The 5GAA helps to define and develop the next generation of connected mobility and automated vehicle solutions. Established in September 2016, it unites an ever-growing member base currently at 134 members, including eight founding companies: AUDI AG, BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm Incorporated.

The 5GAA supports the idea that 5G will be best able to carry out critical communications for safer driving, support enhanced V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communications and connected mobility solutions. www.here.com

Volvo Buses demonstrates electric autonomous solution for bus depot

Volvo Buses shows the significant potential of buses in depot. The live demonstration, one of the world’s first for a 12 m electric and autonomous bus at a bus depot, represents an important milestone in Volvo Buses’ autonomous journey towards safer, cleaner and more efficient public transport. The demonstration, held together with bus operator Keolis, took place at Keolis’ bus depot just outside of Gothenburg, Sweden. During the demonstration, the fully-electric 12 m autonomous bus successfully drove itself between the parking bay and several workstations including cleaning, servicing and electric charging, before parking itself in the correct bay – all while carrying passengers.

Volvo Buses is at the forefront of the development of autonomous buses. In ten years, an additional one billion people will most likely be living on the planet, most of whom will live in cities. This will create even greater demands on public transport, infrastructure and urban planning, which in turn needs to be managed in an even more sustainable and efficient way. www.volvobuses.com

Phunware releases enhancements to LBS sample code

Phunware, Inc. a fully-integrated enterprise cloud platform for mobile that provides products, solutions, data and services for brands worldwide, has announced the expansion of its Location Based Services sample code to enable more use cases developers can implement in applications using Phunware’s Location and Mapping Software Development Kits (SDKs).

The enhancements also come with designed user interfaces that eliminate the need for developers to build and design custom interfaces. These user experiences provide standard user interfaces that follow iOS and Android best practices and are already familiar to end users. www.phunware.com

New regulatory procedures for non-geostationary satellites

The 38th ITU World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-19) has adopted a new innovative milestone-based regulatory approach for the deployment of nongeostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) satellites in specific bands and services.

The agreement reached at WRC-19 establishes regulatory procedures for the deployment of non-geostationary satellites, including megaconstellations in low-Earth orbit (LEO). The milestone-based approach will provide a regulatory mechanism to help ensure that ITU’s Master International Frequency Register reasonably reflects the actual deployment of such NGSO satellite systems in certain frequency bands and services. In defining more flexible timelines and objective criteria, this approach also seeks to strike a balance between the prevention of spectrum warehousing, the proper functioning of coordination mechanisms, and the operational requirements related to the deployment of NGSO systems.

While satellites in geostationary orbit are aligned with the earth’s rotation at an elevation of 36,000 km, NGSO satellites move across the sky during their orbit around the earth, in medium Earth-orbit 8,000 – 20,000 km above the earth and in low-Earth orbit at elevations between 400 and 2000 km.

With the availability of launch vehicles capable of supporting multiple satellite launches, megaconstellations consisting of hundreds or thousands of spacecraft are becoming a popular solution for global telecommunications, including to remote rural areas and isolated communities, providing low-latency broadband coverage (owing to their proximity to the earth’s surface), remote sensing, space and upper atmosphere research, meteorology, astronomy, technology demonstration and education.

Filings for frequency assignments to NGSO satellite systems composed of hundreds and thousands of satellites have been received by ITU since 2011, in particular in frequency bands allocated to the fixedsatellite service or the mobile-satellite service.

Under the newly adopted regulatory approach these systems will be required to deploy 10 per cent of their constellations within two years from the end of the current period for bringing into use, 50 per cent within five years, and complete the deployment within seven years. www.itu.int