The aggressive collection of large-scale 3D data by Intermap Technologies for its countrywide NEXTMap programs is poised to enable a broad range of applications. V1 Magazine editor Matt Ball sat down with Intermap’s CEO, Brian Bullock, to discuss the benefit of this data from a sustainability perspective.
This is part two of a two-part interview. To learn more about the history and approach that Intermap is taking in the marketplace, view the first interview here .
V1: The focus of V1 Magazine is the application of spatial technologies to the issues of sustainable development. As we began exploring the idea, we realized that spatial technology has been playing at this interface between infrastructure and the built environment for some time, and has a great contribution to make going forward. Do you see sustainability as a driver for your business?
Bullock: Intermap provides better data to provide for better planning and environmental management. Sustainability affects everybody in resources, whether a company is involved in forestry, mining, or petroleum. No matter the market, they all have to be very cognizant of their footprints, and drainage is usually a key to the environmental impact of any development.
We became involved early in the national petroleum reserve project in Alaska. We want to provide the very best elevation map possible so that, if and when exploration happens, the exploration can be planned to have minimum impact on the drainage on the North Slope.
We’ve already demonstrated that, in the production areas in which they’re working, our data really improves their knowledge of the micro-drainage. That knowledge is critical, because when you change the micro-drainage, you can significantly change the environment. Beaver ponds provide a good example of the importance of drainage – they’ll create a whole new ecosystem. Let a few beavers get into what had previously been a dry sagebrush valley and all of a sudden, you have a wetland. Drainage is critical.
V1: Is your technology also being used to calculate carbon offsets in forested areas?
Bullock: Yes, we can calculate the biomass of forests using two different wavelengths of IFSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar) X-band. This technology can capture the top of the forest canopy. Intermap is testing an experimental fully polarized L-band interferometer system – the first one in the world –to capture the ground underneath the forest canopy. With the two instruments working together, we can capture the top and measure the bottom to calculate an estimate of biomass.
Many applications for sustainable development rely on being able to quickly and efficiently measure biomass. We worked with researchers at the University of Washington who conducted a study on estimating forest fuels for forest fire management.
There’s been some work with P-band, which is a very long wavelength. It definitely penetrates the forest canopy, but it’s very difficult to license that technology because it disrupts other signals, such as instrument landing systems, television signals, and garage door openers. L-band is a frequency that is set aside for weather radars and similar applications, and we can work in that frequency without interfering with other emitters.
We became interested in this technology several years ago, and saw multiple applications. One of them was forest sustainability and management but, unfortunately, it wasn’t clear who would pay the bills. Other applications include accurately measuring the forest floor’s drainage capability and being able to see the road surface through the canopy.
We engaged leading researchers in Europe from several universities in this project to help us with the phenomenology. The hardware and processing software aren’t hard to complete; understanding what the data means when you get the signals back is the real challenge. Top researchers are working on this issue, and we should see results from their work within a year.
V1: How does 3D data contribute to the sustainability of built environments?
Bullock: In more developed regions, intervisibility has become a major consideration– particularly in Europe. If I’m going to build a structure, I need to know who is going to be able to see it as well as what I will be able to see from the structure. Having really good elevation models is critical to intervisibility.
People don’t like being able to see cell phone towers, but they’re a necessary evil. So how can we minimize the number of cell towers that we have? Calculating the visibility mask from different possible locations and heights of towers is another key application for the use of elevation data.
Redevelopment is another good example. In Europe, a lot of abandoned factory sites tend to be located next to waterways since shipping was done with barges. Developers like to find those old sites, perform the remediation, and build condos on them – which means they build them in a floodplain.
There’s a huge development, along the lines of 20,000 dwellings, planned for southeast London. Insurers met with the developer and said, “This project is in a floodplain for the Thames River. It hasn’t flooded for some time, but it’s in the floodplain. If you build these units the way you’re proposing, your insurance rate will be ‘x’. If you decided to change your plan by building a garage structure as the first floor that lifts all of the units by ten feet, your insurance premiums will be a fraction of ‘x.’”
Three-dimensional data provides that kind of interaction with the development process. I’ve seen that happening in Florida now, with some of those beachfront properties like the famous Fontainebleau Hotel. The new expansion has the garages at the base, and the units are elevated by one or two stories. If you get a storm surge you might lose a few cars, but you don’t lose all the condos.
I think that good elevation data, and the good maps that data provides, helps us be more environmentally responsible, more responsive to forces of nature, and able to make more informed planning decisions.
"I think that good elevation data, and the good maps that data provides,
helps us be more environmentally responsible, more responsive to forces
of nature, and able to make more informed planning decisions."
V1: Sustainability also speaks to greater efficiency. Is there a good example of how 3D data aids efficiency?
Bullock: I think the most exciting application that our data may enable is the reduction of fuel consumption and, therefore, carbon emissions. Some time ago, we felt that it might be possible to squeeze some extra miles per gallon out of vehicles by developing “smart” cruise control technology. By placing precise 3D slopes and inflection points in a vehicle, you would create a cruise control system that’s responsive to elevation gains and losses of the road, thereby improving the vehicle’s fuel economy.
Intermap funded a study last year at Auburn University, which has a class A truck numerical simulator. The resulting Auburn paper stated that a billion gallons of fuel a year could be saved by the U.S. trucking industry with the intelligent cruise control system enabled by 3D data. That’s a savings of more than $3 billion in the domestic trucking market alone.
The technology is called drive train management. Instead of a cruise control that tries to maintain a constant velocity, the truck is allowed to slow down a little bit when going uphill – it doesn’t downshift, it stays in high gear – and then it accelerates a little bit when going downhill. By programming intelligently and managing the drive train, operators can save fuel and money – and reduce their carbon emissions.
Fuel-optimized routing is a second area in which I think we will achieve gains in fuel economy. Using 3D data, a driver’s route is programmed to avoid areas where the vehicle would use more fuel simply because there are more ups and downs. We started out researching this idea on our own, and now Eaton Corporation and Cummings Diesel have both joined the project. It has now gone into phase two – actual testing. I think that’s going to be a very exciting development that will really help the trucking industry.
In addition to trucking, we wanted to investigate the potential for fuel savings with hybrid vehicles. Hybrids have an energy reservoir onboard –the battery. Right now, the hybrid only gains energy when the driver brakes. When the brake is applied, the vehicle gains energy; it releases energy when the accelerator is applied. Again, knowing the inflection points on slopes means that your energy could be depleting on the uphill and recharging on the downhill. If a vehicle gets to the top of the hill and the battery’s full, you’ve got no place to put any energy – so you want to make sure you’re always getting to the top of the hill with the battery partially depleted. Our data can be used to inform the vehicle of where the top of that hill is located. Intermap initiated a study at Clemson University, which has a hybrid simulator, that’s due to be finished the middle of this year. We’re expecting quite strong results out of that research.
We’re so delighted that Congress passed the new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards because they’re putting a real push on maximizing fuel economy. I think you’ll see smart cruise control extended to passenger vehicles: providing 3-D road data and smart cruise control systems will save money without increasing drive time significantly. BMW did a test a few years ago in which they achieved a 15 percent improvement in fuel economy with only a 2 percent reduction in drive time.
V1: It’s exciting to see these steps toward fuel efficiency. The idea of intelligent transportation is another idea that’s been around for some time, but I’m not sure what it will take for people to give more control to their machines.
Bullock: I listened to a radio program last year in which people were talking about not talking on your cell phone while you’re driving because of the distraction. One woman called in and said, “Well my car should be smarter so I don’t have to pay as much attention to what the car is doing.” That’s where we’re headed.
Sweden has established a goal of zero fatalities from traffic accidents by the year 2020 – zero. Between the United States and Europe, 100,000 people are killed each year in traffic accidents, and we completely ignore it. We’re concerned about losing 3,000 soldiers in Iraq, which is a terrible loss of life, but, during that same period, we killed 200,000 people on U.S. highways. Nobody says a thing about that number, and a lot of those fatalities are young kids.
The first tragedy is that the technologies to prevent accidents exist today. The second tragedy is it’s actually a net reduction of the cost of the transportation system, because those technologies can be implemented at a lower cost than what we’re paying for the insurance to pay for all this carnage on the highways.
It costs about half a trillion dollars a year in insurance payouts in the United States and Europe to fund our transportation. If you divide that into the number of cars produced per year, you can put an enormous amount of technology in cars that allow them to talk to each other and resolve conflicts. Traffic flow would be improved and carbon emissions would be reduced because fewer vehicles would be idling at a stop.
Those of us who have been working in this area, and studying intelligent transportation, can see that improvement coming. I’m so delighted the auto industry has picked up on this whole idea of active safety; the manufacturers are actually advertising these applications to get consumers to expect their car to be intelligent.
V1: Tell me a little more about active safety.
Bullock: I was in a meeting with one of the companies that invented electronic stability control. It’s a technology that is already saving an enormous number of lives. One of our advisors, Dave McLellan, was there with me and he posed a philosophical question, “Is the driver in control or is the vehicle in control?” With electronic stability control, the driver is in control; the technology is just helping the vehicle do what you’re commanding it to do.
The manufacturer was having a hard time accepting the idea that the vehicle could take control. Dave asked, “Once the vehicle knows something is going to happen and it can respond faster than the driver, should we let the vehicle respond?” Dave went on to say, “Once you know the only result is going to be a crash, why wouldn’t you do everything possible to mitigate the consequences of that crash?”
The whole concept is that when humans see something coming and the response is to hit the brake, they never hit the brake hard enough. The most powerful control mechanism in the car is the brakes. But people, even though they see the accident coming, tend to hit the break with 20-30 percent breaking authority. And Dave’s point was, “Once the calculation is complete, that even with full braking authority you’re going to crash, why wouldn’t you put on full braking authority?”
This conversation was about two years ago. Volvo has just introduced a car that begins breaking before the driver hits the brake because it recognizes something’s in the car’s path: it knows that a collision is imminent and it calculates the closing distance and the car’s velocity. A couple of years ago, Acura began developing what it calls brake assist, which is tied to their adaptive cruise control. Acura’s system does the same thing, but it waits until the driver hits the brake; instead of hitting with 20 percent authority, it automatically gives the car 80 percent.
So the day is coming, and it’s coming fast, when vehicles are going to become position self-aware and velocity self-aware, and they’ll also detect objects around them and be able to assist the driver. This technology will go beyond advising the driver, and right into taking preventative action.
The aggressive collection of large-scale 3D data by Intermap Technologies for its countrywide NEXTMap programs is poised to enable a broad range of applications. V1 Magazine editor Matt Ball sat down with Intermap’s CEO, Brian Bullock, to discuss the benefit of this data from a sustainability perspective.