With news last week that one of Google’s autonomous cars was involved in an injury – it supposedly wasn’t at fault – it seems a fitting time for a ‘city’ to be opened dedicated to the testing of such vehicles.
The University of Michigan has opened Mcity, the world’s first controlled environment specifically designed to test the potential of connected and automated vehicle technologies that will ‘lead the way to mass-market driverless cars’.
“We believe that this transformation to connected and automated mobility will be a game changer for safety, for efficiency, for energy, and for accessibility,” says Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Mobility Transformation Center. “Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in. These technologies truly open the door to 21st-century mobility.”
Mcity is a 32-acre simulated urban and suburban environment that includes a network of roads with intersections, traffic signs and signals, streetlights, building facades, sidewalks and construction obstacles. It is designed to support rigorous, repeatable testing of new technologies before they are tried out on public streets and highways.
“There are many challenges ahead as automated vehicles are increasingly deployed on real roadways,” Sweatman says. “Mcity is a safe, controlled, and realistic environment where we are going to figure out how the incredible potential of connected and automated vehicles can be realized quickly, efficiently and safely.”
In particular, Mcity allows researchers to simulate the environments where connected and automated vehicles will be most challenged. Even seemingly minor details a vehicle might encounter in urban and suburban settings have been incorporated into Mcity, such as road signs defaced by graffiti and faded lane markings.
The types of technologies that will be tested at the facility include connected technologies – vehicles talking to other vehicles or to the infrastructure, commonly known as V2V or V2I – and various levels of automation all the way up to fully autonomous, or driverless vehicles.
MTC is a public-private partnership among industry, government and academia. The center was established to lay the foundation for a commercially viable ecosystem of connected and automated mobility that will revolutionize the movement of people and goods worldwide. A key MTC goal is to put a shared network of connected, automated (including driverless) vehicles on the road in Ann Arbor by 2021.
In addition to Mcity, MTC has three on-roadway connected and automated vehicle deployments underway.
Companies working with Mcity include leaders in the vehicle manufacturer and component industry, including Delphi, Denso, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and more.
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