ROSEDALE, N.Y. — Navigating an airport parking lot, like one on the sprawling campus of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, while hauling luggage and corralling family members to any of their five terminals can be a daunting and tiring task.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hopes to ease that experience soon with autonomous vehicles.
This week, the bistate agency is testing three electric autonomous vehicles — that somewhat resemble large, contained golf carts — that can each hold up to 20 people sitting and standing. The vehicles move and stop without a driver and travel platoon-style.
Platooning is a concept in which vehicles are equipped with software so they can communicate with each other and travel in sync in close proximity without touching. Picture magnetic toy trains moving on a track, but the magnets are repelling, not stuck together.
Seth Wainer, the Port Authority’s director of innovation, explained the idea to reporters who rode the vehicles with Port Authority officials during a demonstration on an unused road.
Platooning
“They’re platooning together between 6 and 7 feet apart and going up to 20 miles an hour,” Wainer said. “This is very exciting because we, at the Port Authority, hope to see ways that autonomous vehicle technology can serve as the future for public transportation and we’ll look for small applications like getting from a parking lot to the AirTrain and getting people around the airport campus.”
Wainer’s department spends about $3 million a year to test out new technology that could be integrated into the Port Authority’s myriad modes of transportation across tunnels, bridges, terminals, ports, airports and train systems.
The Port Authority has also tested bus platooning on the exclusive bus lane into the Lincoln Tunnel, where buses moving slowly closer together could significantly increase the number of buses that travel through the tunnel. The agency has also done other autonomous vehicle tests, as recently as last month. In May, a two-week pilot took place to see how an autonomous, electric street sweeper performed in a parking lot and warehouse near the ports.
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The ‘bird issue’
Earlier in the week, the JFK Airport pilot tested the vehicles’ safety features. The rest of the week, Port Authority officials are looking to see how it handles speed, braking and maintaining distances between vehicles, according to Chiu Chun Leo Tsang, the principal transportation manager for the Innovation Hub and who pitched the idea to agency executives to test.
Tsang said there was an unexpected disruption during testing — the “bird issue.”
There are a lot of birds in the area where they are testing, and the vehicles detected them when they flew too close, causing the shuttles to brake and stop. It was unforeseen, but something Tsang said can be easily remedied by adjusting the software.
Dean Zabrieszach is the CEO of HMI Technologies, the New Zealand-based company that developed the Ohmio autonomous vehicles that are being used during the Port Authority’s pilot. He’s hopeful the Port Authority will continue the pilot with their vehicles into the next phase.
“The intent is, hopefully, we’ve got our fingers crossed, that the Port Authority invites us to stay longer and to demonstrate our vehicles in a much more commercial environment inside the car park,” Zabrieszach said.
“We’d love to set up manufacturing in the U.S.,” Zabrieszach said. “One of the key issues for manufacturers in the U.S. is the ‘Buy America’ rule and we’re happy to comply with that because we want more jobs to be created as a result of the manufacturing and the development of this sort of technology.”