U OF WATERLOO AT FOREFRONT OF DRIVERLESS TECH
Southern Ontario autotech hub has 90 related businesses, writes David Booth.
I made a mistake back in 1974. A big mistake.
The early ’70s marked the meteoric rise of Rene Levesque’s populism and for a young man looking to become a world-renowned engineer — the original plan was to design supercars, not write about them — getting out of Dodge (actually, Sept-iles, Que.) seemed like a good idea.
I decided — actually, my sovereigntist-hating parents decided — that I would head to Ontario. The choice eventually boiled down to two — then comparatively new — engineering schools: Carleton University in our nation’s capital and the University of Waterloo. I (actually, my parents) chose Carleton, mainly because it was closer to home while still being removed from the political upheaval consuming La Belle Province.
Standing, 45 years later, in Waterloo’s brand-spanking-new, 7,000-square-foot Autonomous Vehicle Research and Intelligence Laboratory (AVRIL), I can’t help pondering what might have been.
Frankly, I’m jealous. Smack dab in the middle of AVRIL’S shiny epoxied garage floor is the mother of all driving simulators, a 22-foot-wide, 210-degree curved screen the size of about 21/2 parking spots that will soon simulate everything about the man-machine interface. And rather than some dinky little desk chair and a computer keyboard as simulator, testers will “drive” a full-size, fully functional Chevy Equinox in the comfort of the AVRIL laboratory.
In another corner, there’s a Cadillac SRX that will soon start monitoring good driving behaviour so the engineering department’s lab rats — wonderful programmers all, but perhaps a little light on actual driving experience — can “code” future self-driving cars to, well, drive like humans. And then there’s the wonderfully crude, Chinese-built, eight-person electric shuttle specifically chosen for its glorious lack of sophistication because this makes it easier for project leaders to add their own autonomous hardware without first having to tear the poor dear apart.
But pride of place goes to the university’s (semi) famous Autonomoose. Essentially a Lincoln MKZ with Lidar (light detection and ranging), Autonomoose is central to the University of Waterloo’s research that might finally allow self-driving cars to navigate a Canadian winter.
Indeed, Uwaterloo made big news recently when it released data collected from over two years of Autonomoose driving through fog, ice, snow and all the other wonders that are a Canadian winter. But don’t self-driving cars have radars and cameras and such that lets them “see” the road? Why do they need data?
As Michał Antkiewicz, one of the research engineers in charge of Autonomoose, explains, before they can see where to drive, autonomous automobiles must be able to recognize what they’re seeing. That’s where the new Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions Dataset comes in.
Over the past two winters, the lowly Lincoln has been filming snow banks, black ice and snow-covered cars that plague local roads. The data collected — quite literally images and videos from Autonomoose’s eight cameras — will eventually be used by self-driving cars to recognize their surroundings.
I don’t think it takes a PHD in engineering to understand that recognizing the difference between a completely snow-covered car parked on the side of the road (a very hard surface to hit) and an ordinary snowbank (not nearly as intractable a surface to interact with) would be a good thing. Waymo, Ford and a few others are also testing self-driving cars in winter conditions — or at least paying lip service to such research — but the harshness and diversity of conditions of our Canadian winters means the data — which is open-source and free to anyone, by the way — just might be a game-changer.
The reason I’m envious of all this is what’s making the University of Waterloo a powerhouse in automotive engineering (behind only Ohio State and the University
of Michigan, says Ross Mckenzie, managing director of the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research WATCAR program). Most of this research is conducted by students.
The leaders are all premier professors in their fields — Krzysztof Czarneck, in the case of Autonomoose, and John Mcphee, in the case of the drive-in-sized driving simulator — but the grunt work is all done by grad students.
Indeed, Uwaterloo has been renowned for its work co-op program ever since its school of engineering first opened its doors to 74 mechanical engineering students in 1957. By way of comparison, the campus now comprises more than seven buildings, home to more than 10,000 engineering graduate and undergrad students. Many universities now do the same, but Waterloo’s ability to task the brightest of young engineers to specific research and data collection quickly has created the powerhouse that is now the Kitchener-waterloo region. Besides Uwaterloo, Wilfrid Laurier and Conestoga College, and more than 90 autotech-related businesses now make for a southern Ontario autotech hub.
Automakers and suppliers — from Ford, Blackberry and data giant Geotab to startups such as Darwin AI and Sober Steering — looking to outsource their research to the university have created a 90-company-strong ecosystem centred on the research centre that is the University of Waterloo’s engineering faculty. Waterloo and the surrounding area is a centre of automotive research and engineering envied by Detroit, Stuttgart, and even tech-savvy Silicon Valley.
One of the reasons that the University of Waterloo has been so successful in attracting research contracts is, well, modesty. Yes, that most famous of Canadian attributes is also at the root of attracting so much outside research. You see, says engineering prof George Freeman, unlike virtually every university in the U.S., the University of Waterloo itself doesn’t take any of the research money coming in.
To be clear, when a company comes looking for engineering partners, only the faculties and professors leading the research are at the negotiating table. In the U.S. the elephant in the room is a university administrator looking for control of research it doesn’t understand, and a tithe of the fees involved. By streamlining and simplifying the process, Uwaterloo renders the entire experience more entrepreneurial — key, says Freeman, to preparing his engineers of tomorrow for the harsh realities of today.
It’s also why I am, some 40 years after I graduated, envious. Access to self-driving cars (undergrad students have their own self-driving Chevrolet Bolts to tinker with), motorcycle-powered Formula SAE race cars and an in-house CAD/CAM machine shop that even undergrads can play with? Wow! I may be 62 years old, but where do I sign up?
Autonomoose is central to the University of Waterloo’s research that might finally allow self-driving cars to navigate a Canadian winter.