Ford has teamed up with MIT on a project that will, among other things, help electric shuttles determine current levels of demand among pedestrians, as well as determine which locations have the highest demand in any given moment. The collaboration advances the ride-hailing concept to new heights by examining the movement of pedestrians to predict demand and reduce wait times for shuttles.
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“The onboard sensors and cameras gather pedestrian data to estimate the flow of foot traffic”, says vice president of research and advanced engineering at Ford Ken Washington. Google’s Self-Driving Car Project uses that data to develop algorithms that tell the car how to behave in very specific situations-as specific as a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom, in one well-publicized case.
Since its first self-driving auto (a Toyota Prius) hit the road in California in 2009, Google has been collecting data on how its autonomous vehicles interact with pedestrians on public roadways. For now, the MIT research is happening with the Aeronautics and Astronauts Department’s Aerospace Controls Lab.
Pedestrian flow on the campus has already been monitored over the last five months with LiDAR sensors and cameras mounted on three vehicles. This group will use a mobile application to hail one of three electric urban vehicles to their location and request to be dropped off at another destination on campus.
Getting better results from lower-resolution LiDAR systems has a number of potential advantages, including making hybrid self-driving tech less dependant on supplemental info provided by cameras, and potentially reducing the cost of production of self-driving vehicles, which would make producing them at-scale more viable for auto makers and using them more affordable for auto owners or passengers in a shared system. The technology is much more accurate than Global Positioning System, emitting short pulses of laser light to precisely pinpoint the vehicles’ locations on a map and detect the movement of nearby pedestrians and objects.
In addition to helping Ford improve its Dynamic Shuttle project, which now operates fearing shuttles to employees at the vehicle company’s Dearborn, Michigan campus, the collaboration with MIT will help with Ford’s general aim of exploring different kinds of future transportation under the Ford Smart Mobility umbrella. Right now, the shuttles will be driven by actual drivers, but the experiment involves mapping routes and patterns in order to improve LiDAR technology. According to Ford, the technology it is using is more accurate than Global Positioning System.
University research partnerships are an important part of Ford’s broader effort to change the way the world moves. The Ford Smart Mobility will look after the connectivity, mobility issues on the project.
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Ford Motor Company is a global automotive and mobility company based in Dearborn, Michigan. Along with that this project will be able to get the experience of valuable data of Ford resources on autonomous vehicles, customer experience and data analysis. With the biggest companies investing heavily in self-driving technology such as GM, BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford, it seems destined that the day will come when humans won’t play a role in getting from place to place in their vehicles.
