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Mcity photo
Even if you're old school and prefer to drive, you can't ignore the progress of the driverless car.
Here's the latest: Mcity announced on its website on Wednesday that it will launch a driverless shuttle service on the University of Michigan’s North Campus beginning this fall. Mcity is a U-M-led public-private partnership "to accelerate advanced mobility vehicles and technologies."
The service will use two fully-automated, 15-passenger, all-electric shuttles manufactured by French firm NAVYA to transport students, faculty, and staff on a non-stop two-mile route between the Lurie Engineering Center and the university’s North Campus Research Complex (NCRC)on Plymouth Road, the press release said.
“This first-ever automated shuttle service on campus is a critical research project that will help us understand the challenges and opportunities presented by this type of mobility service and how people interact with it,” Huei Peng, director of Mcity and the Roger L. McCarthy Professor of Mechanical Engineering at U-M, said in a statement. “The shuttles will augment U-M’s busy campus bus service to provide another mobility option.”
In addition to lidar, which uses invisible laser beams to build a view of the surrounding environment, and GPS for localization, the two NAVYA ARMA shuttles will also be equipped with on-board cameras and Wi-Fi communications to capture data generated during operation.
