UCLA’s Mobility Lab is Steering Us Into the Future of Transportation
At the forefront of autonomous vehicle research, the lab brings together engineers, public health experts, and social scientists to develop smarter, safer, and more sustainable driving systems. From high-tech Lincoln sedans equipped with LiDAR and cameras to cutting-edge simulations in CARLA, UCLA is testing how driverless cars interact with real-world environments—and how they'll impact society. With shared data and forward-thinking studies, the lab is helping cities and policymakers prepare for a future where autonomous vehicles are the norm, not the exception.
Transcript
00:00:00 The Mobility Lab at the UCLA School of Engineering is driving our community into a safer future by spearheading new research into the development of autonomous vehicle systems. Researchers at the Mobility Lab cooperate and share their findings across several academic disciplines in an effort to pioneer new automated vehicle prototypes, smart infrastructure, and sustainable
00:00:18 transportation systems. My lab, we have multiple autonomous driving uh vehicles. We've been working with the professors in social science, professor in public health to looking looking at when these technologies are deployed, what are going to be the impacts, right? So autonomous driving is a very complex issue. Now our program has been focusing on the remaining challenges right this
00:00:40 technologies are still facing. To test this technology, the lab utilizes these Lincoln sedans as their autonomous vehicle prototypes. We often see cars and sensors like these being experimented with at the intersection of Westwood Plaza and Charles E. Young Drive South where the researchers can collect data. So the in this prototype project we have two connected vehicles
00:01:00 and we have two infrastructure units that is uh equipped with lighter sensors with camera sensors. Why we use the LAR and the camera data? Because the LAR have the 3D information and the image have the 2D information and we can combine them together to have a better understanding of the scenario. The driving data collected from these sensors are then applied to virtual
00:01:22 simulations that measure the vehicle's ability to react to its environment such as avoiding obstacles, obeying traffic laws, and improving the systems ability to predict on what lies in the road ahead. We also have a lot of uh simulation data set that's built on Carla which is a simulation software that can imitate the uh driving simulations in our computer so that we
00:01:42 can try to simulate different uh scenarios that it is hard to obtain in real world. This vehicle data is also shared so that members of academia, the auto industry and urban planners can more accurately anticipate what mainstream transportation will look like in the US in the decades to come. We have done actually a study right as part of the mobility center investments
00:02:01 really looking at our metropolitan planning organization they came with assumption with easier travel there more increased the congestion and we actually modeled very carefully came to a 9.1% we call vehicle miles travel increased because the ease of travel people change their travel behavior and now it's time for government agency planning organizations for them to stay alerted
00:02:26 they need to get prepared for this autonomous future. With the rapid pace of this research, it may only be a handful of years before autonomous vehicles become a mainstream mode of transportation in our cities. But for now, the minds at the UCLA Mobility Lab continue to work on their goals in bringing that driverless future to fruition. I'm Andre Salceto with the
00:02:44 Daily Breuin.