Meet the brain behind Neom's autonomous transport ambitions

A number of the world’s leading engineering minds are assisting to design a fully autonomous transportation system for Saudi Arabia’s Neom megacity.

Fleets of self-driving electric vehicles use advanced radar technology and communicate with each other and the city itself to greatly help them 1 day transport things and persons without any dependence on human drivers.

The project may be the brainchild of Dr Nahid Sidki, a Syrian-born engineer and pioneering roboticist who includes a 30 year track record of delivering trail-blazing autonomous vehicle projects.

A good former executive director of the Stanford Research Institute’s prestigious robotics centre, Dr Sidki is currently the principle technology officer of the study Products Development Enterprise (RPDC), a Riyadh-based innovation centre that's section of the Saudi Arabia Advanced Study Alliance (Saara), a network of research and advancement organisations from both the public and exclusive sectors, which counts oil giant Aramco among its founding users.

Dr Sidki has assembled a global team of designers, professionals and products scientists for the project, which aims to create vehicles that can handle level five autonomy - the best level and a concentrate on that has so far eluded the world’s leading engineers.

The transportation system Dr Sidki and his team are working on is built to function without any human being input at all, setting it aside from most of the self-driving cars in development all over the world.

In order to accomplish that, Dr Sidki’s team intend to implement innovative, high-tech sensor and networking technology.

Unlike the self-generating cars being developed by automotive industry giants like BMW, Volvo, Nissan and Tesla, which rely heavily on lidar sensors to scan for obstacles, the Neom vehicles will use radar sensors embedded and distributed around the bodywork.

Dr Sidki told The National that the lidar devices currently being used will be unsuitable for terrain like the deserts of Saudi Arabia and could leave a self-traveling car susceptible to failure.

“Lidar is an extremely good sensor, nonetheless it has a large amount of limitations,” he said. “The sensor has limited spectrum and performs badly in the rain, in fog, or in a sandstorm. Here in Saudi Arabia we have a whole lot of sandstorms. If that sensor failed, the complete system would fail.”

Dr Sidki said that while corporations like Tesla are actually pouring plenty of money into developing clever software, insufficient resources are being devoted to improving the sensors required for navigation.

“Many of these companies are actually investing billions found in the autonomy and the software, however, not so much found in advanced sensor development.”

Though the project continues to be in the first stages of a five-year development cycle, Dr Sidki’s team has already built a prototype miniaturised radar system that could be printed on a non-metallic surface just like a car body.

In July of this past year, Tesla’s Elon Musk told the World Artificial Cleverness Meeting in Shanghai that he was “extremely positive” that the 1st fully autonomous vehicles were on the horizon.

But experts say significant hurdles to the production of the technology remain.

Daniel Faggella, the founder of AI research firm Emerj, said the wide selection of conditions that any self-driving car is likely to encounter was a key hurdle for engineers hoping to create a system capable of full autonomy.

“Vehicles need to operate in your day time, nighttime, in snow, sleet, rain or perhaps hail,” he said.

“The diversity of not merely the cars which have to move, but the objects, items, people and vehicles that remain them is indeed great therefore vast that managing those edge cases is very challenging.”

A further hurdle that has so far held back the production of totally autonomous vehicles, he added, was the high degrees of precision and stability they need to be able to operate safely.

High degrees of safety will be required for passengers and transport authorities to simply accept self-driving a vehicle vehicles, he said.

To attain greater operating security, the cars planned for Neom will also feature decentralised processing and make use of 5G to talk to other cars and with the smart metropolis itself.

RPDC, that was founded in 2015 as the national center for technology production and commercialisation, includes academic and commercial research centres within an attempt to convert the Kingdom’s innovation into breakthrough technology.

The innovation hub has already supported the creation of a robotic arm for inspecting undersea oil pipelines, a harmful job usually carried out by human divers.

Alongside King Abdullah City of Research and Technology (KACST) and the pharmaceutical company SaudiVax, RPDC is also working to establish the Kingdom’s primary production plant for vaccines.