Steven E. Shladover, Sc.D. is a Research Engineer at the California PATH Program of the Institute of Transportation Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, where he leads the PATH research activities related to vehicle automation systems. He joined the PATH Program in 1989, after eleven years at Systems Control, Inc. and Systems Control Technology, Inc., where he was leading the company’s efforts in transportation systems engineering and computer-aided control engineering software products. Dr. Shladover received all of his degrees in mechanical engineering, with a specialization in dynamic systems and control, from MIT, where he began conducting research on vehicle automation in 1973. He also satisfied the course requirements for a doctorate in transportation systems at M.I.T., acquiring a thorough understanding of transportation system planning, modeling and evaluation. He has been active in ASME (former Chairman of the Dynamic Systems and Control Division), SAE (ITS Division) and the Transportation Research Board (Chairman of the standing committee on Intelligent Transportation Systems from 2004-2010, and member of the Committee on Vehicle- Highway Automation from its founding until 2010), and was the chairman of the Advanced Vehicle Control and Safety Systems Committee of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America from its founding in 1991 until 1997. Dr. Shladover leads the U.S. delegation to ISO/TC204/WG14, which is developing international standards for “vehicle-roadway warning and control systems”. He was the recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Innovative Practice Award from the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division in 2008.
Dr. Shladover has been working on vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure cooperative intelligent transportation systems for most of his career, combining simulation, development and testing of the technological elements with broader evaluation of their applications to solving transportation problems. He led PATH’s work in the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium (NAHSC), which applied vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure cooperative systems to support automated vehicle driving, including a high-visibility public demonstration. In recent years, Dr. Shladover has been developing intersection collision warning systems, cooperative adaptive cruise control systems and automated truck platooning systems. He has served on several special study committees developing recommendations for the National Research Council on intelligent transportation systems and unmanned ground vehicles. He has also been very active internationally, including a three-month Visiting Professor appointment at the Center for Collaborative Research at the University of Tokyo.