DRIVING FORCE BEHIND A CITY OF CARS THAT OPERATE THEMSELVES
▶ Vehicles in Saudi Arabia’s desert megacity will work without any human input, says inventor
Some of the world’s top engineering minds are helping to design a fully autonomous transport system for Saudi Arabia’s Neom megacity.
Fleets of self-driving electric vehicles will use advanced radar technology and communicate with each other and the city itself to transport goods and people without any need for human drivers.
The project is the brainchild of Nahid Sidki, a Syrian-born engineer and pioneering roboticist who has spent the past 30 years delivering trailblazing autonomous vehicle projects.
A former executive director of the Stanford Research Institute’s prestigious robotics centre, Mr Sidki is now the chief technology officer of the Research Products Development Company, a Riyadh-based innovation centre.
RPDC is part of the Saudi Arabia Advanced Research Alliance, a network of research and development organisations from both the public and private sectors, which counts oil giant Aramco among its founding members.
Mr Sidki assembled an international team of designers, technicians and materials scientists for the project, which aims to produce vehicles that are capable of level five autonomy – the highest level and a target that has so far eluded the world’s top engineers.
The transportation system his team are working on is designed to function without any human input at all, setting it apart from most of the self-driving cars in development around the world.
In order to achieve this, the team plans to implement new, high-tech sensor and networking technology.
Unlike the self-driving cars being built by automotive industry giants like BMW, Volvo, Nissan and Tesla, which rely heavily on light-detecting sensors to scan for obstacles, the Neom vehicles will use radar sensors embedded and distributed around the bodywork.
Mr Sidki told The National that the light detection and ranging systems currently being used would be unsuitable for the deserts of Saudi Arabia and could leave a self-driving car vulnerable to failure.
“Lidar is a very good sensor, but it has a lot of limitations,” he said. “The sensor has limited range and performs poorly in the rain, in fog, or in a sandstorm. Here in Saudi Arabia we have a lot of sandstorms. If that sensor failed, the whole system would fail.”
He said that while companies like Tesla were pouring money into developing clever software, not enough resources were being devoted to improving the sensors required for navigation.
“Most of these companies are investing billions in the autonomy and the software, but not so much in advanced sensor development,” he said.
Though the project is still in the early stages of a five-year development cycle, Mr Sidki’s team has already built a prototype miniaturised radar system that could be printed on a non-metallic surface like a car body.
In July of last year, Tesla’s Elon Musk told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai that he was “extremely confident” that the first fully autonomous vehicles were on the horizon.
But experts say significant hurdles to the development of the technology remain.
Daniel Faggella, the founder of AI research company Emerj, said the wide variety of conditions that any self-driving car would be likely to encounter was a key hurdle for engineers hoping to build a system capable of full autonomy.
“Vehicles have to operate in the daytime, night time, in snow, sleet, rain or hail,” he said.
“The diversity of not only the cars, but the objects, items, people and vehicles that are around them is so great and so vast that handling those edge cases is very challenging.”
A further hurdle that has so far held back the development of fully autonomous vehicles, he said, was the high levels of precision and reliability they would need to be able to operate safely.
He said that the highest safety standards would be required for passengers and transport authorities to accept self-driving vehicles.
To reach greater operating safety, the vehicles planned for Neom will feature decentralised computing and use 5G to communicate with other vehicles and with the smart city itself.
RPDC, which was founded in 2015 as the National Centre for Technology Development and Commercialisation, brings together academic and industrial research centres as part of an effort to convert the kingdom’s innovation into breakthrough technology.
The innovation hub has already supported the development of a robotic arm for inspecting undersea oil pipelines, a dangerous job usually carried out by human divers.
Alongside King Abdullah City of Science and Technology and the pharmaceutical company SaudiVax, RPDC is also working to establish Saudi Arabia’s first production plant for vaccines.
Lidar is a very good sensor but it performs poorly in a sandstorm. Here in Saudi Arabia we have a lot of sandstorms NAHID SIDKI Autonomous transport pioneer