A giant touchscreen takes up most of one wall in a room at the Curiosity Lab, in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. The figure standing in front of it can see live camera feeds from around the area, including several junctions and pedestrian crossings, some roundabouts and even a fountain in a public park. Another view shows a live map of traffic congestion and construction sites from the Georgia Department of Transportation. Yet another focuses on a single junction, with a computer algorithm labelling objects as cars, motorcycles or people. Its accuracy fluctuates: overhead traffic signals swinging in the breeze are labelled as motorcycles, and an area of shadow on a grassy strip is misidentified as a pedestrian.
Nature Outlook: Cities
Curiosity Lab, an economic-development initiative in a suburb of Atlanta, calls itself a “smart city living laboratory”. Situated in the 200-hectare Atlanta Tech Park, it features a 4.8-kilometre stretch of roadway dedicated to trying out autonomous vehicles (AVs) and associated sensors, cameras and data networks. Instead of being an isolated test track, the road is part of a city street that carries more than 14,000 cars every day. This allows researchers from companies and academia to road-test not only AVs, but also a system powered by camera feeds, networked traffic signals and lidar sensing — the laser-based version of radar — that enables cars to talk to each other and to city infrastructure.
Beep, a start-up from Orlando, Florida, has tested its autonomous shuttles on this roadway. T-Mobile, the country’s second-largest wireless telecommunications company, is using 5G connections to investigate what new products both it and its customers might offer based on the technology, including AVs, drones and other robotics. In the next building, a garage houses three fully driverless sport utility vehicles (SUVs) developed by May Mobility of Ann Arbor, Michigan. These are equipped with lidar on the roof and cameras on each side to see all around the vehicles. In September, May Mobility launched a partnership with the car-hailing service Lyft to offer the driverless cars in midtown Atlanta on a limited basis.
“This is a huge part of why we do what we do,” says Valerie Chang, managing director of Curiosity Lab, standing next to one of the SUVs. “Having a live deployment on this scale where you’re in a real city with real roads and real intersections” makes it easier for companies to win contracts, she says. They can say “we actually did it in a real city on a real road”.
At Curiosity Lab in Atlanta, Georgia, vehicles, cameras and traffic signals can be connected wirelessly.Credit: Curiosity Lab
Getting smart
Peachtree Corners is not the only location where researchers are running trials to discover the future of urban mobility. Cities from San Francisco and Singapore to London and Lisbon are branding themselves as ‘smart cities’, on the basis of their ability to collect and use the ocean of data that a modern city generates. And transportation is a key application.
Some researchers think that sharing data between vehicles and infrastructure will move the world beyond today’s modest technological status quo, in which a handful of driverless taxis are navigating city streets. The future will belong to connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) that will base their driving decisions on information they share with each other and with roadside base stations. The pay-off of such automation will be improvements in safety, travel time and fuel economy. The CAVs, in turn, could be part of a larger vision in which public buses, trains, electric scooters, rental bicycles, delivery drones, mobile phones and even electric helicopter-like taxis all work together to make it easier for people and goods to move through a city.
Henry Liu, a civil engineer and director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, runs MCity, a 13-hectare test facility similar to Peachtree Corners. His lab is working with the city of Ann Arbor on a Smart Intersections Project that includes the installation of sensors and data-transmitting roadside units at half of the city’s 150 signal-controlled junctions. MCity is funded by a US$10-million grant from the US Department of Transportation and matching grants from corporate partners, including car-makers Ford and Toyota, and chip manufacturer Qualcomm.
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