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Imagining a Driverless Future & Testing Technologies at "MCity"

University of Michigan engineers are visualizing how a typical morning with a driverless car might go, and what steps need to be taken for that future to be realized. Mcity is 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. 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.

Topics:
Automotive Software Test & Measurement Transportation

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    Transcript

    00:00:04 When you need a ride, you pull out your smart device, you press in a code, you request a service and a vehicle comes to meet you and deliver you to where you want to go. I'll be able to hop in the car and I do work, or maybe I relax, or I read about the soccer game last night as I travel to work. And the car pulls up, I hop out, and that car goes off and then pick someone else up. That ride will be provided in a driverless vehicle that's got very high utilization so, at the heart of the system it becomes a very efficient because that vehicle can go here to give someone a ride, go there... So the requirement for parking and so on

    00:00:51 reduces dramatically. This is gonna be a fantastic future. Probably the biggest fear is the idea that someone will bring a driverless vehicle to market before it's ready. We need to work together to make sure that, the system that we deployed or systems that we deploy are going to be as good as it possibly can be, that the data is going to speak to the success of what's happening, and that we'll have a great partnership between the industry and government at all levels. There's some technical challenges that need to be

    00:01:30 worked out, there's some occasional surprises of getting some of the cameras to accurately see the world for what it is. One of the things we see is any time there's a significant advance in technology, it tests some of our existing laws and regulations. How do we rethink who's at fault in the crash. If you're gonna take the driver out of the car, you're probably gonna see some of the liabilities shipped from drivers to the designers and manufacturers of automobiles, and I think everyone has questions about that. These connected and automated technologies are transformational, whether we talk about

    00:02:08 safety, traffic efficiency or energy efficiency, we want to get them out on the real roads as quick as we can. So we've created this safe, off roadway testing environment, so we can accelerate the whole process. M-City is a purpose-built, repeatable environment in which to test automated and connective technologies without putting people in danger. For people who don't trust the system or they feel that there may be some safety or some other risk that they're facing, these things I think will hopefully in the near future, start to disappear as they start to prove that these things work.

    00:02:48 There will always be holdouts, but there will certainly be pioneers who are willing to say, "You know what? This is a better system, this is a safer system." Over the next ten years we're going to go through an incrediblly exciting transition period where we gonna see more automated systems at various levels and purposes, being offered and deployed out on the roads. We're gonna be collecting a lot of data that tells us how that transition is going. You know, once we get to the end of the next decade, we're gonna be in a totally different place.