Self-driving car safety on motorways tested
TECHNOLOGY GIVEN REAL-WORLD CHALLENGES
ACADEMICS are to team up with Highways England to ensure the country’s motorways can accommodate self-driving cars.
As part of a £1 million project, researchers from Loughborough University will look at operations at roadworks, merging and diverging across lanes and at junctions and lane markings to understand the challenges connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) may face.
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: Infrastructure Appraisal Readiness (Caviar) is being carried out in partnership with construction company, Galliford Try.
Mohammed Quddus, professor of intelligent transport systems, the principal investigator on the project, said: “There is significant investment and advancement in CAVs.
“It is, however, not known whether existing road infrastructure, which was designed for conventional vehicles, is ready for the safe and efficient operations of CAVs.
“Caviar directly addresses challenge.
“Although CAVs are designed with existing infrastructure in mind, ensuring they are safe to operate on motorways will require evaluating how road layouts affects their operational boundaries such as their ability to sense lanes and make appropriate decisions.”
Real-world data from different lane configurations will be collected and fed into the simulation models to calibrate and examine how CAVs respond to lane changes.
In terms of lane markings, the platform will be utilised to understand how environmental conditions affect a CAVs ability to detect lane markings, such as snow, and low lighting – for example, at night.
For merging and diverging scenarios, inconsistencies in geometric configurations will be appraised to this
DATA: Vehicles fitted with an array of sensors will collect data for tests off-road examine whether CAVs are able to merge safely from the local road network, at low speed, to the motorway.
Loughborough will lead the work on the development and validation of the simulation platform.
Prof Quddus said: “Our vision is to deliver a world-leading experimental and simulated platform for assessing motorway infrastructure readiness level for CAV operations underpinned by the sciences of artificial intelligence, statistics, optimisation and verification to realise the Government target of having selfdriving vehicles on UK roads by 2021.
“We will fit a vehicle with a plethora of sensors including radar, cameras and GPS to collect motorway operational data,” Prof Quddus said.
“This data will allow us to evaluate whether a CAV can navigate these situations by conducting a series of controlled experiments at an offroad test facility,” said co-investigator Dr Craig Morton, of the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering (ABCE).
Jon de Souza, of Galliford Try, said: “The project will significantly further our understanding of the implications for highway infrastructure on a future increase in the quantity of connected and autonomous vehicles.
“The recommendations from Caviar will support contractors such as
Galliford Try to improve their offer as well as supporting highways operators to make better long-term capital and operational investment decisions.”
John Mathewson, of Highways England, said: “Our fund is all about stimulating innovation and supporting research and trials to ensure the UK remains ready to adopt cuttingedge technology.
“This research will give us further insight into how connected and autonomous vehicles would operate on England’s motorways and major A roads and what challenges they may face.
“The results could help us shape how we invest in future road design.”
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