Driverless cars are an exciting alternative to the modern day domestic vehicle. The future of transport is set to be ever more interesting by the year with many wondering about what the next big thing in futuristic transport will be? One of the main innovations that has everyone talking is the driverless car, how it functions, how it knows and how it learns?
In Michigan, there has been a custom-made town created to enable driverless vehicles the opportunity to test and develop their driver skills. The test site is called Mcity‘ and it sits just outside of Ann Arbor. It was created to challenge driverless cars and put the technology and abilities of the cars to the test. Mcity opened in July 2015, cost over $10 million to make and was built on land owned by the University of Michigan.
Mcity has an extensive list of industry partners and affiliates who invest and utilise the town for testing purposes, this includes car manufacturers such a Honda, Toyota, Ford, and BMW. Ford motor car announced that is was the first to use the Mcity facility.
Mcity is the first controlled environment that was specifically designed to test potential automated and driverless cars, it boasts an impressive 4.24 miles of roadway to be tested on. The facility includes an intersection, rail crossing, roundabouts, parking spaces and more. It also has the facility to install fake pedestrians and obstructions for the cars to identify.
Mcity also has a network of sensors so all vehicles can be monitored at all times as they navigate through the town. They have even developed areas that are issues that have been identified for driverless cars such as tree canopies that block GPS signals as a result of their moisture content. There is also signal blocking tunnel, metal bridges and railway crossings to interfere with radar systems as well as the hazards for normal drivers such as blind bends, gravel road and bad drivers.
The reason for developing the town with these structures built in is to create a high standard of care for barriers that the vehicles will come across in the real world, it also helps to develop regulatory standards for driverless vehicles in future pushing industry leaders to develop new technology to turn weakness areas and barriers into strengths. The world is unpredictable and driverless cars have to be made with that in mind.
The research conducted at the test site could potentially shape the driverless cars of the future. The thing to consider is that driverless vehicles could be on the road at the same time as manual vehicles, which ordinarily would sound like the logical thing to do, however, all the crashes that Google’s test-phase autonomous vehicles were caused by humans rather than the self-driving vehicle.
