The current approach to connected and autonomous driving function development and evaluation uses model-in-the-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and limited proving ground work followed by public road deployment of beta version of software and technology. The rest of the road users are involuntarily forced into taking part in the development and evaluation of these connected and autonomous driving functions in this approach. This is an unsafe, costly and inefficient method. Motivated by these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method of safe, efficient and low cost connected and autonomous driving function development, evaluation and demonstration. The VVE method is compared to the existing state-of-the-art. Its basic implementation for a path following task is used to explain the method where the actual autonomous vehicle operates in a large empty area with its sensor feeds being replaced by realistic sensor feeds corresponding to its location and pose in the virtual environment. It is possible to easily change the development virtual environment and inject rare and difficult events which can be tested very safely. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication based pedestrian safety is chosen as the application use case for VVE and corresponding experimental results are presented and discussed. It is noted that actual pedestrians and other vulnerable road users can be used very safely in this approach.

This paper proposes the use of an on-demand, ride hailed and ride-Shared Autonomous Vehicle (SAV) service as a feasible solution to serve the mobility needs of a small city where fixed route, circulator type public transportation may be too expensive to operate. The presented work builds upon our earlier work that modeled the city of Marysville, Ohio as an example of such a city, with realistic traffic behavior, and trip requests. A simple SAV dispatcher is implemented to model the behavior of the proposed on-demand mobility service. The goal of the service is to optimally distribute SAVs along the network to allocate passengers and shared rides. The pickup and drop-off locations are strategically placed along the network to provide mobility from affordable housing, which are also transit deserts, to locations corresponding to jobs and other opportunities. The study is carried out by varying the behaviors of the SAV driving system from cautious to aggressive along with the size of the SAV fleet and analyzing their corresponding performance. It is found that the size of the network and behavior of AV driving system behavior results in an optimal number of SAVs after which increasing the number of SAVs does not improve overall mobility. For the Marysville network, which is a 9 mile by 8 mile network, this happens at the mark of a fleet of 8 deployed SAVs. The results show that the introduction of the proposed SAV service with a simple optimal shared scheme can provide access to services and jobs to hundreds of people in a small sized city.

A robotics lab is a hub of various technologies working together under the expertise of the human mind under a single roof. While anyone can make their own robotics lab, housing numerous robots in a room does not qualify as a robotics lab. In layman's terms to constitute an ideal robotics lab, one needs a perfect balance of hardware, software, design tools, and human resource. However, many people fail to understand this simple idea and, as a result, are often stressed when planning to build one. In short, the problem areas are lack of information resources and time to understand them.

Robotic arms perform inner frame welds for 2018 Honda Accord vehicles during production at the Honda of America Manufacturing Inc. Marysville Auto Plant in Marysville, Ohio, U.S.. But humans are still an integral part of the assembly process. President Trump might think that the way to protect workers in the U.S. is to wage trade wars with countries that he believes are undercutting the prices of domestically-produced goods. But it is increasingly obvious that the real issue is the latest wave of automation. Of course, reports like those from the McKinsey Global Institute and Oxford University have been warning for a while that many of the jobs we know today are at risk of disappearing as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and widespread.

More than three decades after Honda Motor Co. first built an Accord sedan at its Marysville, Ohio, factory in 1982, humans are still an integral part of the assembly process -- and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Even as doom-and-gloom reports suggest robots are poised to replace human labor and automotive upstarts like Tesla Inc. aim to largely remove people from the production line, workers keep toiling side by side with machines in Marysville. And Honda's approach is working: The Accord won the prestigious North American Car of Year award at last week's Detroit auto show. "We can't find anything to take the place of the human touch and of human senses like sight, hearing and smell," Tom Shoupe, the chief operating officer of Honda's Ohio manufacturing unit, said in an interview. Markus Schaefer, production chief at Mercedes-Benz, in 2016 said the carmaker was de-automating and relying more on humans to install the endless array of options that luxury customers demand.

Enrique Zarate, 19, had spent just a year in college when he landed an apprenticeship at a new BMW facility in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. If he performs well, in a year he'll win a well-paid position, with benefits, working with robots at the company's newest plant. Within a decade or so, most of the BMW 3 series cars that Americans buy will probably come from Mexico, built by people like Zarate. "When you start with such little experience, and get such a big salary, it's unbelievable," says Zarate, whose father is a taxi driver and whose mother is a housewife. Exports from Mexican factories have jumped 13% since 2012.