Driverless shuttle pilot to get underway in Calgary
Electric vehicle will be cold-weather tested in Edmonton in December
Calgary Zoo and science centre goers won’t have to rely on a driver in order to hitch a ride between the two attractions this month, thanks to the arrival of the first autonomous vehicle in Western Canada.
The city has launched a driverless shuttle pilot project that will transport people between the Zoo’s LRT station and Telus Spark from Sept. 8 to 30. The shuttle vehicle will be cold-weather tested in Edmonton in December.
ELA, or Electronic Autonomous, will operate at a maximum speed of 12 km/h, carrying 12 people at a time between the two Calgary sites.
“The long-term strategy for autonomous vehicles obviously is to be able to be able to operate on mixed traffic roads and so this is one step in that direction,” said Dan Finley, vice-president of business development for Pacific Western Transportation, which is responsible for ELA’s operation, procurement and safe management.
The 100 per cent electric vehicle, described by Finley as a “souped up, large golf cart,” uses innovative technologies to know where it is, what’s around it, and when it needs to stop. It’s programmed to follow a specific route at low speeds for this pilot project, but can actually travel up to 45 km/ h.
Using LiDAR sensors, GPS and video cameras, it creates a 3-D map to understand its surrounding environment, Finley said.
“It manages by exception, so it understands what’s normally there and when there’s something that’s not normally there, it looks for that and it identifies whether the trajectory of that item, that vehicle, car, bicycle is going to interact with it or if it’s going to avoid it,” he said.
“If a vehicle approaches ELA, it basically looks very much like a two-lane road in a community here in Calgary. It would have the same type of space requirements as a vehicle on a road.”
After more than 170 deployments in 20 countries around the world, there have been zero accidents, Finley said.
“The vehicle is extremely safe,” he said. “People that are around the vehicle can understand that you get into it, it’s very similar to a transit unit, it’s very similar to something you can get in, have a seat and enjoy a ride.”
The pilot is co-sponsored by Telus and Atco, in addition to a $50,000 grant from the federal government.
Calgary MP Kent Hehr also announced Wednesday a $290,000 commitment to the City of Calgary to establish a connected vehicle test bed along 16 Avenue North, spanning 12 intersections, which aims to allow city staff to familiarize themselves with connected vehicle technologies, support shorter travel times and ensure safety for emergency vehicles.
“Essentially, 16th Avenue, being one of the busiest transportation hubs in our city, is an excellent test bed to allow autonomous vehicles to start stopping and starting, creating and moving along those systems to allow us to gauge its effectiveness,” Hehr said.
At the site of the pilot, researchers at the University of Calgary will analyze movement of vehicles and pedestrians throughout the month of the project.
“We have installed what’s called a distributed acoustic sensing system along the entire route of the autonomous vehicle and we’ve repurposed an oilfield instrument,” said Rob Ferguson, an associate professor in the department of geoscience. “We can track, with high precision, the location of not only the autonomous vehicle but anything else that’s moving around close to the autonomous vehicle.”
By picking up vibrations, that system buried in the roadway of the ELA’s route will allow researchers to observe data that could help ensure the safety of pedestrians who come into close contact with driverless vehicles.
Following its stint in Calgary, ELA will move to Edmonton, where it will run through December in order to test its capabilities in cold weather and snowy conditions.
“Winter testing is really about a variety of different things,” Finley said. “Obviously we want to be testing the slickness of roads, we want to understand what it’s going to do as people are getting on and off the vehicle with snow on their feet.
“We think that Alberta’s a good place to do the testing.”