VHA Committee Meeting at 2019 TRB Annual Meeting

Post date: Jan 28, 2019

Dear Members and Friends of TRB Vehicle-Highway Automation Committee:

First of all, welcome to the many new Friends who have signed up to receive information about our committee within the last month.

For the benefit of those of you who were not able to attend the TRB Annual Meeting last week, I would like to update you on several highlights from the meeting:

- Despite the partial government shutdown and a snow storm during the opening weekend, we had excellent attendance for our sessions and committee meeting during the Annual Meeting. A few of our speakers had to cancel their trips to TRB because of these problems, but most speakers were able to participate.

- One important announcement from this Annual Meeting is that we will be rotating committee members and chair this spring. I am pleased to announce that the incoming chair will be Jane Lappin of the Toyota Research Institute, who has already been very deeply involved in the committee’s work for many years and will therefore be able to hit the ground running. I am confident that the committee is in good hands with Jane taking over in a few months.

- Our Committee Communications Coordinator, Prof. Jiaqi Ma, has set up a new website for committee information, where you can see current and recent information about committee activities. You can access this website at: https://sites.google.com/site/trbvehiclehighwayautomation

- We expect to have copies of the presentations that were given at our committee meeting posted there in the near future. The presentations for our formal conference sessions will be posted on the main TRB website, but access to those is limited to people who registered for the Annual Meeting.

- Planning for this summer’s Automated Vehicles Symposium 2019 is now well underway. We had a discussion about breakout session topics during our committee meeting, followed by a very active meeting of the CORVA subcommittee, where a large number of breakout session topics were brought forward for discussion and solicitation of volunteers. The sponsors of those topics will be preparing proposals for the breakout sessions in the near future. The number of proposed breakout sessions is likely to exceed the number of meeting rooms that we will have available, so it will be necessary to down-select the strongest of the breakout proposals.

- AVS19 will be July 15-19 in Orlando, and registration is open now at www.automatedvehiclessymposium.org.

You must register by January 31 to be able to take advantage of the early-bird discount, so please don’t wait to do your registration.

Best regards,

Steve Shladover

Chair, Vehicle-Highway Automation Committee (AHB30)