University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center aims to deploy a shared fleet of networked, driverless vehicles in Ann Arbor, US by 2021, making it the first city to deploy autonomous fleet.
U-M Transportation Research Institute director Peter Sweatman said Ann Arbor will be seen as the leader in 21st century mobility.
"We want to demonstrate fully driverless vehicles operating within the whole infrastructure of the city within an eight-year timeline and to show that these can be safe, effective and commercially successful," Sweatman added.
General Motors Michigan Engineering professor of practice Larry Burns said, "We’ve now entered into a period where the technology and the business models are coming together to allow us to break out of this 100-year dependence on what we’ve always known."
Researchers have already started the process to conduct the nation’s largest street-level connected vehicle experiment called Safety Pilot, which involves about 3,000 area residents in networked vehicles.
In October 2013, U-M had granted approval for a one-of-a-kind driverless car test environment near North Campus.
Following the approval, the researchers are planning to develop a replica of the dynamic cityscape on a 30-acre facility with investment of $6.5m to test the vehicles’ performance in complex urban settings.
