Mcity is a simulated city with building facades and sidewalk cafes. They’re also problems that have cropped up with Google’s driverless cars, which have gotten into some fender-benders in recent months.
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The city aims to provide a platform for the scientific (“rigorous, repeatable”) testing of robot chauffeurs before they flood public roads so that they can be rolled out to the mass market with minimal fuss.
Built on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, the “city” was created to re-create the situations self-driving cars would bump into (or not) on the road. Others like Tesla Motors (TSLA) and GM’s Cadillac are close to introducing technology that automates highway driving. This is Michigan, it’s not California. “We’re not going to let Silicon Valley take this technology”. Mcity will be available for use by any organization, but priority will be given to MTC partners and U-M faculty and students. The team soon found the auto never advanced, because human drivers kept jumping out ahead of it. So a year ago, it tweaked the software to make the auto creep forward, the way humans do, signaling that it wants its turn.
Hundreds of people gathered Monday for the unveiling, including politicians and automotive industry leaders.
There are now 375 automotive research centers in Michigan. In early July, Navistar demonstrated its commitment for connected vehicle technology by offering its OnCommand Connection remote diagnostics system as a standard offering on all new International® trucks and IC Bus™ school buses.
MTC is a public-private research and development partnership aimed at developing a commercially viable ecosystem of connected- and automated-driverless vehicles. There now are 48 industry sponsors of Mcity, whose names and banners hang from a fence around the track.
Sweatman said he has had “a number of conversations with Google“. “It’s been designed specifically to be challenging”. Freeway signs, graffiti, HOV lanes-it’s all recreated here, so that engineers and researchers can figure out how autonomous vehicles will react. “Automated” refers to vehicles with some driverless features, but not fully driverless or “autonomous”.
“Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in”. Another 33 affiliates have committed to investments of at least $150,000 over three years. “This is the facility that’s going to help us get there”, he said.
Even the smallest details of Mcity have been planned out in advance to replicate conditions that connected and automated vehicles could face in the real world.
Jack Hu, interim vice president of research for the University of Michigan, says the development of autonomous vehicles could have broad societal implications.
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“We needed some place just like the real world, but one where we could control and test things 100 times exactly the same way”, Sayer told Autoblog.
