Activities, Findings and Perspectives in the Field of Road Vehicle Automation in Japan

Abstract

In Japan, collaboration between industry, government, and academia have been developing a variety of initiatives to create automated driving technologies since the past few decades. In recent years, the major automobile makers have been actively developing vehicles equipped with automated driving technologies. They carried out demonstration runs using these vehicles at CEATEC Japan 2013 and the ITS World Congress 2013, held in October 2013. At the same time, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism established the Autopilot System Council which, from June 2012 until August 2013, organized and studied both the challenges and successes of automated driving on expressways and prepared the autopilot achievement road map. It presented the results of its studies in an interim report released on October 8, 2013. In the future, the public and private sectors will cooperatively promote and realize the early achievement from both the vehicle side and road side matters studied based on the process established by the road map.