Ford Motor Co.is testing autonomous vehicles at a new simulated city at the University of MI.
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Ford says that it has been testing autonomous cars for a decade now and is now expanding testing to realistic roads and neighborhoods to accelerate research of advanced sensing technologies.
Here’s an idea: rather than work the bugs out of self-driving vehicles on real-word roads, why not used a “simulated urban environment”, complete with faux buildings and traffic lights?
These KITT cars are loaded up with cameras, radar and LiDAR – laser sensors that help to generate a real-time 3D map of the car’s environment – so they can be tested on roads that are like the real thing, but where nothing is left to chance. The Fusion is tested over a range of surfaces and maneuvers along roads of varying sizes, as well as ramps, roundabouts and tunnels. That all starts here at MCity, where we can test safely and learn very fast. “This is an important step in making millions of people’s lives better and improving their mobility”.
“Every mile driven [at MCity] can represent 10, 100 or 1,000 miles of on-road driving in terms of our ability to pack in the occurrences of hard events”, University of MI professor Ryan Eustice, who’s working with Ford on self-driving technologies, said in a statement. This is impressive considering many other automakers only plan to offer semi-autonomous systems by 2020.
“We are pleased to welcome Ford as the first automaker to use Mcity to test autonomous vehicles”, said Peter Sweatman, director of the Mobility Transformation Center.
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While Google has been testing a limited number of its self-driving cars on suburban streets (including one that was pulled over by police on Thursday in Mountain View, California), the University of MI facility was built in partnership with companies like GM and Honda to present a more controlled environment. This is what Henry Ford did 112 years ago.
