UMTRIsignals12(109).JPG

Cars pass under a stoplight at Fuller Road in Ann Arbor that has been equipped with a sensor by the U-M Transportation Research Institute. Researchers say the connected vehicles research project could be the first step towards self-driving cars.

(Courtesy UMTRI)

As it prepares to break ground on a $6.5 million test track, the new University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center already has its sights set on taking over the roads of Ann Arbor.

The center, a cross-disciplinary collaboration, announced that it is aiming to put a fleet of connected and autonomous vehicles on public roads by 2021. If successful, the area would likely be the first in America to have a shared fleet of networked driverless vehicles.

U-M Transportation Research Institute director Peter Sweatman is also heading up the new center. He said that putting autonomous cars on the road is a process that will involve years of engineering work.

“We view automation in terms of progression of taking the feet off the pedals, hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, and eventually the bum out of the seat so that it’s completely driverless,” he said.

“Those stages are interesting and they’ll happen through time. We’ll have to go from one stage to the next.”

UMTRI already has a head start on connecting vehicles. The institute is running an $18 million pilot program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation that put sensors into nearly 3,000 cars driven by Ann Arbor residents.

The sensors currently in cars and trucks on the roads of Ann Arbor are passive, gathering data by interacting with each other and sensors posted at busy intersections, around sharp curves and on local freeways. The goal of the MTC is to expand the ability of those sensors and eventually give them decision-making power.

“We think this tech is important because it’s so transformational,” Sweatman said.

“First and foremost, we can avoid most crashes. We can also avoid a lot of the stops vehicles make in traffic and we can design vehicles completely differently.”

Sweatman added that the new vehicle design will be possible because transmissions and engines will no longer have to be designed for use by humans. The processes can be streamlined as they are automated.

“They can become much lighter,” he said. “The design freedom that will come about from removing the normal considerations is going to create a lot of synergies in a lot of different areas.”

The possibility of substantially innovative vehicle design has attracted a number of automotive manufactures to the project, and also a host of other companies more peripherally attached to the automotive industry.

“We’re talking to a number of makers, but we regard this as a new ecosystem of companies that will be involved,” Sweatman said.

“It includes automakers, IT companies, telecom companies, rental companies and taxi companies. In that mix there will be a bunch that are very accustomed to dealing directly with consumers. The customer interfaces will be very important, but there’s a lot of B2B [business to business] to make the system work behind the scenes. We think that’s pretty critical to figure that out.”

For Ann Arbor, having the center of this connectivity effort could mean more companies like IT firm NVIDIA setting up shop and looking to hire engineers, designers and developers in the area.

"The most exciting prospect is the enormous economic and technological opportunity MTC offers to our region and the U.S. by literally reinventing the automobile more than a century after its first introduction on our nation's roadways," University of Michigan vice president for research Stephen Forrest said in a statement.

The center will work not only on the function and design of the vehicles but also the legislative and regulatory framework that would accompany them. Forrest pointed out that there are issues that must be addressed across a spectrum of disciplines in order to put autonomous vehicles safely on the road.

“When it comes to 2021, that means we’ve adopted an eight-year time horizon for the Mobility Transformation Center,” Sweatman said. “And we want to be able to show a pretty meaningful deployment of connected and automated transportation for people and freight that’s big enough so that we could understand how the system might work.”

Ben Freed is a business and general assignments reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at benfreed@mlive.com and follow him on twitter at @BFreedinA2