This week’s episode focuses on driving safety and the work of the research team at the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) at the University of Iowa. Ben’s guest is Dr. Dan McGehee, UI professor and director of NADS.

Find our previous episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Ben Sindt:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Ben Sindt, and if this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and out of the field of public health. Today, we’ll be chatting with Dr. Daniel McGehee, the director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator Laboratories here at the University of Iowa and a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Emergency Medicine, Occupational and Environmental Health, and Public Policy. Welcome to the show, Dr. McGehee.

Before we get started, more information can be found out about the National Advanced Driving Simulator at nads.uiowa.edu. That’s N-A-D-S.uiowa.edu. All right, so in a brief synopsis, can you explain what the driving simulator is and what the benefits to simulation are?

Dan McGehee:

Thank you very much, Ben, for having me today, it’s great to be here. I’ve listened to a number of your podcasts and it’s a great service that the College of Public Health is providing. The College of Public Health has been a long partner in driving simulation from as far back as I can remember, but driving simulation is unique. Many people, and your listeners may have even had a rudimentary driving simulator in their driver’s education from way back when. Certainly there are driving games out there, but high fidelity driving simulation as it’s known, is really used in a couple different ways. I think the main principle is that we can put people into positions that are far too dangerous to do on a test track and certainly on the public roadways.

Dan McGehee:

So, the National Advanced Driving Simulator is a national laboratory under the USDOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who does safety policy work and sets safety standards for the US government. So, the National Advanced Driving Simulator really used to not only develop new technologies, but to test emerging technologies, as well as understand the limits of driver performance, human performance in the context of alcohol, legal and illegal drugs like cannabis, over-the-counter drugs like antihistamine kinds of drug. So, really what we do is we provide an immersive environment.

Dan McGehee:

So, this a simulator, which is made up of a full size vehicle. So, right now we have a Toyota Camry in there. There’s SUVs, there’s tractors, there’s heavy truck cabs that we can put in. The driver is surrounded by a 360 degree view of this virtual world. Inside that dome that sits on top of six big spidery legs and then moves around a really large bay that is as big as a basketball stadium. So, it has a lot of room to move, to mimic the forces of driving. So, when you break hard, you get thrown forward, when you feel the seatbelt, when you swerve, you get all of the dynamic situations of what you would feel in the real world.

Dan McGehee:

So experimentally, we can put people in into the exact same conditions every time, versus when we drive on the road, we lose that experimental control to be able to put people into the same situation. So, it’s something that we should have you out sometime, like I said, many of your colleagues in public health have done work there.

Ben Sindt:

Yeah. So, that’s really cool. So it sounds like driving simulation could be done anywhere. How did it end up … one of the largest in the world end up here in Iowa?

Dan McGehee:

It’s a great question though, that is a bit odd that out here in the Midwest, away from the auto industry and the Detroit area, or Silicon Valley, that this device is here, but it’s really based on a very rich history in developing vehicle dynamics models, which is a geeky area of engineering and mechanical engineering, that was first started here by a mechanical engineering professor named Ed Haug, very famous engineer who wanted to take his engineering research to another level. Normally that’s done on computer. So, computational simulations is where you can run thousands and millions of combinations and permutations of different ways systems can work. So you can model for instance, a shock absorber and make it work in all sorts of different ways. But when you want to actually connect it to the dynamic world of how a human driver works, there’s a lot of uncertainty in how we drive.

Dan McGehee:

You drive differently than I do. My daughter drives differently than I do. Everybody has a very different, unique signature in how they steer, how they break, how they accelerate. That’s important for engineer and designers to understand that variation among drivers, to make sure that we’re considering all of the different options of how you can design the best and safe system.

Dan McGehee:

So, the reason they came to Iowa was that Professor Haug, who was very well connected, as a university, he had a vision of creating a national laboratory here at the University of Iowa and approached the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as the National Science Foundation to do a national competition. And in the national competition in the very end, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Iowa were the finalists. University of Michigan also, as you can imagine, being in the backyard of the big three forever, had a lot of history in automotive engineering as well. The National Science Foundation ultimately picked the University of Iowa because of its long simulation experience and the National Advanced Driving Simulator was then built here.

Ben Sindt:

Yeah, that’s really cool that all that path led us to having this here at the University of Iowa, especially for a public health college. And speaking of public health, usually people think of public health as more of like the hospital medical idea. In your opinion, why is the driving simulator important for our public health?

Dan McGehee:

I think that probably one of the most and least understood areas of public health is automotive safety. I think before COVID, car crashes were the number one cause of death for people ages 14 to about 27 or 28. The number one cause of death and serious injury. So, car crashes are a serious public health issue. They get swept under the carpet sometimes, but in an average year, we lose about 34,000 to 40,000 people just in the US alone and over a million people a year in the world, die on roads, whether they’re a pedestrian, a bicyclist, a driver.

Dan McGehee:

So, when you compare it to other areas of public health, it’s actually really one of the highest injury and fatality rates of anything that you can do in life. Teenagers and young people, the most dangerous thing they can do is drive a car. So, that’s something that we keep very close to ourselves, especially in our collaborations with our colleagues in the College of Public Health. And that’s certainly something that they appreciate, but I think the motoring public, while many people have known of person that has been killed in a car crash tragically, or seriously injured, it’s something that we … there’s a one of and another and another, and it’s in the noise if you will. And that I think is really a challenge for us that are trying to severely reduce or eliminate altogether, car crashes.

Ben Sindt:

So, I’m sure most people before hearing this podcast, had only vaguely heard of the idea of simulated driving. How did you in your career path lead you to where you are today?

Dan McGehee:

Well, I think that I like to say, like they do in Iowa, I took the long way around the barn to get here. I actually started in aviation, out of undergraduate school. I started working at Boeing in their advanced flight deck research. So, their cockpit research division, where simulation of the next generation of cockpit was going on. So, I studied pilot performance, workload and vision and helped design elements of different cockpits. The simulator there was key because you can’t grab a 747 and go for a three or four hour joy ride to run an experiment. So, flight simulation was really where I started my career, studying eye tracking patterns of pilots. When I went back to grad school, after a few years, I met a professor who was doing pretty much the same thing in the automotive domain. After that, I was hooked on automotive and I’ve had a lot of different opportunities to build the first generation crash avoidance systems that are now quickly becoming ubiquitous on new cars. That’s largely because of the opportunities here at the University of Iowa to put those together, but aviation was really my first love in my work, which is a whole lot of fun to get taught how to fly a big jet liner, right out of college.

Ben Sindt:

So, some of the work the National Advanced Driving Simulator has been working on recently is the UX guys actually started the demonstration project on testing a partially automated shuttle bus that drives around rural areas here in Iowa City. Your team is also recruiting local partners to ride with you. Can you speak more on this new, automated driving and things that are not quite simulated, out in the public somewhat now?

Dan McGehee:

Yeah. So, increasingly the cost of putting some of these technologies onto the public roads has come down considerably. Because we study safety overall, we are very sensitive about when and how we implement on-road testing. Most of the automated driving work demonstrations and others are done in urban areas that have sunshine 24/7 practically, 365 days a year. So, I just late last night returned from Tempe, Arizona, where I was able to test one of the new Google cars known as Waymo, is their division for automated driving, in the desert but in heavy urban traffic. But urban areas are unique because they generally have really good quality roads, perfect roads, perfect paint, that computer vision systems and other sensors see from these vehicles, whereas the rural environment, which really makes up most of North America outside of our really large cities of Los Angeles, and Houston, and New York, and many others, really have infrastructure that is well maintained, whereas rural North America, whether you’re in Canada or the US, is made up of gravel roads and unmarked rough roads that are not well maintained.

Dan McGehee:

So, what we decided to do is own our ruralness and study the imperfect and make automated vehicles understand the imperfect world better. A number of our collaborators in the auto industry thought we were crazy to do this and thought it was impossible to do, but we indeed are now doing that. As we speak, we are running a 47 mile rural loop that goes down to Riverside and over to Kalona, Iowa and back around to Iowa City in a shuttle bus. It’s working out pretty well and so the data that are collected from that are going to be made public, whereas when you look at other computer industry companies, they don’t release their data because it’s a very proprietary thing. It’s not because there’s some safety issue, they’re not. There’s a lot of regulations that states like California and others put together to make sure that the motoring public is safe from these vehicles. But this is the first study that people from around the world will be coming to Iowa City to look at the data that we’re gathering in this very unique environment.

Ben Sindt:

So, that’s really awesome that we’re getting automation already out on the roads, but the US is very car-centric country, we’re built for cars. How do you see automation taking a hold in our everyday life? Do you see it happening sooner, 100 years from now, et cetera, how do you see it coming out here forward?

Dan McGehee:

I think it’s going to come in stages. I think it will be a very long time before the self-driving vehicles will become ubiquitous in our society, but I think they will slowly build. In fact, one thing you don’t see here or in Iowa City yet, hopefully soon, is little delivery robots that are the size of a couple of suitcases stacked on top of one another, that deliver sandwiches, or pizza, or even specialty within city, if some has a special package from a law firm that needs to go across town that’s made up of papers and files, they can be picked up by those, which may have been historically done by bicycle driven delivery folks. But, I was just in Tempe, Arizona this week and I saw probably over a dozen of these delivery robots operating on the sidewalks around Arizona State University.

Dan McGehee:

They have partnerships there with Silicon Valley companies, again, because they have dry sidewalks year round. It’s much more difficult when we get out to the Midwest and other snowbound states that have rain and slush and grit, for these little robots to operate. I think that’s going to be really one of the biggest challenges. Driving related, complete robot driving is still, even though the technology is here today, one of the big challenges is how policy makers can implement these kinds of vehicles safely. So, it’s one thing for a really large and wealthy corporation, like Google’s Waymo division, to make these kinds of cars work. You can go to Tempe right now today, within a certain geo-fenced area and take out your Waymo One app and actually call one of these vehicles. I recommend people go to Tempe and do that, it’s really one of the most incredible experiences to drive. After a while, I like to say that it’s remarkably unremarkable to actually drive one of these vehicles, ride in one of these vehicles rather, to see it making decisions. In fact, we were on a rural, excuse me a residential roadway, and the vehicle even slowed down for a pigeon in the road. So, these sensor systems are quite sophisticated today. Like I said, our team was very impressed with how well these vehicles are operating today.

Ben Sindt:

Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how legislation and technology advance here forward. But for listeners that are interested in driving simulation and research, is there a way for them to participate in studies?

Dan McGehee:

Yeah, so I think we’ll provide some links for you as part of your podcast. If you go to the National Advanced Driving Simulator website, nads.uiowa.edu, you’ll find some links on how to participate in different studies. We have a large database of people, that every study has a different kind of pre-screening required. Sometimes we need younger drivers, older drivers, drivers with different medical conditions, and so forth. So, once you enter your information into our website, then hopefully you’ll get called at some point to participate either in an on-road study, or on the simulator.

Ben Sindt:

Nice. As a final question here, we usually ask our people we interview, what’s one thing you thought you knew, but you were later wrong about?

Dan McGehee:

Oh gosh. Well, I think I’m being slowly … Actually this week was a big one for me. I’ve been quite skeptical about automated driving and how well it can be implemented. I’ve been looking behind the curtain for about 30 years with the technologies that have come together today. I was very impressed with how Waymo, Google cars division has implemented their self-driving vehicles in very complicated traffic with pedestrians. We started off in a supermarket parking lot which was crowded, ended up with another shopping center, which was crowded with pedestrians and bicycles and even pigeons. This vehicle worked almost flawlessly. This is a recent application that’s now on the road and testing with real people.

Dan McGehee:

So, your listeners can go, like I said to Tempe, download the Google One app, as long as they’re within a certain region of Chandler, Arizona, you’ll get picked up by a robot car and get to experience that. It’s much like picking an Uber or a Lyft. You just dial in where you are, it tells you, of course your phone knows where you are, give it a destination. In 15 minutes, you get picked up by a car that drives into wherever you are.

Ben Sindt:

Nice. That wraps it all together. Thank you for coming on the show today. This was a great conversation.

Dan McGehee:

Thanks Ben.

Ben Sindt:

Great to learn about automated driving and not something people know a whole lot about it, it’s very interesting.

Dan McGehee:

Yeah. Well, thanks, Ben. And thanks for all your team does to get this really important information out to the public. I think as a university, we need to do more to publicly describe our research and why it’s important to the public. Why our research is so relevant, whether you’re in English literature, or public health, or engineering, medicine, what we all do has major relevance to living in a better place.

Alexis Clark:

That’s it for episode this week. Big thanks to Dr. McGehee for coming on with us today. This episode was posted and written by Ben Sindt and produced and edited by Alexis Clark. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Stay happy, stay healthy and keep learning.