Ralph Robinson
Mr. Ralph Robinson is a research scientist and co-lead of UMTRI's Transportation Systems Group. The group consists of two parts: the Office of ITS Integration, which Mr. Robinson heads, and the Office of Sustainability Systems, which John L. Sullivan heads. The ITS Integration Office promotes vehicle infrastructure integration (VII), which allows vehicles to send data to other vehicles and to roadside devices to communicate traffic, navigation, and weather data. The initial focus of the ITS Integration Office is to support the VII proof-of-concept testing currently underway in the Farmington Hills area. Later, under an initial contract with the Michigan Department of Transportation, data generated in this test bed will be aggregated, structured, and analyzed to be used in a number of MDOT safety and traffic management applications. This effort will also support the greater national VII program analysis and several cooperative programs in Europe and Asia where similar efforts are underway. These initial efforts will provide a foundation for ongoing VII application development work being planned for national, state, and local users of these systems.
Prior to joining UMTRI, Mr. Robinson was president and cofounder of the Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration Consortium (VII-C), which represents eight car companies who are evaluating the feasibility of a national deployment of a wireless system. In this role, he was on loan from his primary position at Ford, where he was a senior staff technical specialist. Mr. Robinson was employed at Ford for forty years, holding technical specialist and management positions in product development operations.
Mr. Robinson holds a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Lawrence Technological Institute and three patents for embedded microprocessor designs. He has been a member of the ITS-Michigan Board of Directors, the ITS Congressional Caucus Advisory Committee, the Michigan/Ohio University Transportation Center Evaluation Team, the SAE Dedicated Short Range Communications Technical Committee, and the IDB Forum Board.
