Driverless mini-city gives Singapore an edge
In the race to deploy driverless public transport, Singapore has built a mini-town that could vault it into pole position.
The two-hectare complex, unveiled in November, has intersections, traffic lights, bus stops and pedestrian crossings, all built to the specifications that Singapore uses for its public roads. There’s a hill to check how vehicle sensors perform when they can’t see directly ahead, mock skyscrapers to mimic the radio interference from tall buildings, and a rain machine to simulate a tropical downpour.
The advantage for the city-state is that the test circuit, and the information provided by companies vying to put driverless buses on Singapore’s streets, is helping it build an unrivalled database of information on the challenges and solutions that would allow the government to introduce the technology safely.
“We’re probably the only country that’s looking at this in such a proactive and systematic way,” said Lee Chuan Teck, former deputy secretary at the Ministry of Transport. “What we’re looking at is actually deploying regulations.”
Lee said the data being gathered should allow the government to draft regulations for autonomous vehicles later this year. Singapore’s small size, advanced road infrastructure and highly regulated traffic system make it an ideal test bed for companies developing driverless systems.
There are now more than 10 companies testing vehicles at the facility at Nanyang Technological University in the west of Singapore, said Niels de Boer, programme director for Future Mobility
Solutions at the university. Two buses from Volvo will join them early next year and more are coming, he said.
With so many hazards and intersections on the route, the speed limit at the site is about 20 to 25 kilometres an hour. De Boer said that they want to see what happens under a “controlled environment”.
Seven 360-degree cameras stream live video to the Intelligent Transport Systems Centre downtown. Together with information collected from the vehicles, the government is building a database that will allow it to evaluate whether EVs are ready for public roads and how they should be deployed.
The university is testing a 15-passenger driverless minibus built by the French company Navya, which researchers can operate using the autonomous software, or manually via a video-game style handset.
On a recent, hot morning, it trundled round the course with air-conditioning on full, cutting its seven-hour battery life in half. The bus navigated lanes, halted in front of a wayward pedestrian in the road and stopped at bus shelters to collect and deliver passengers.
Some functions, such as moving off at traffic lights, still had to be manually initiated. On one occasion, it made an emergency stop for some unseen obstacle, throwing passengers onto the floor.
The only place the bus didn’t go was the rain simulator, which de Boer said wasn’t working after being damaged in a recent thunderstorm. So far, vehicles that had been tested in the rain machine hadn’t performed well, according to staff at the site. In about 70% of cases, the sensors were unable to operate successfully in heavy showers.
The university’s test bus may not be the most sophisticated experimental autonomous vehicle in use, but it did demonstrate that driverless vehicles still have many obstacles to overcome. While the use of AI means that the machines will learn rapidly from their errors, the real lesson from the test park is the need for a sophisticated infrastructure outside the vehicles.
“Infrastructure will become more important,” said de Boer. “It’s not enough to know where the vehicle is.”
Operators and traffic officials must also monitor many other possible events — an elderly passenger falling down inside a bus, an unusually large queue at a bus stop, breakdowns and other events.
“Nobody else is putting all three pieces — the trials, the regulations, and the town planning — together,” said Lee, who this month moved to a job at the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
Singapore aims to operate scheduled services using autonomous buses during off-peak periods in three residential areas away from the city centre by 2022.
“We’re probably the only country that’s looking at [autonomous buses] in such a proactive and systematic way”
LEE CHUAN TECK
Former transport ministry official