UC San Diego is going to begin testing self-driving vehicles on campus roads and lanes early next year, taking advantage of the fact that it doesn’t need state permission to carry out such studies.

The research will be run by the school’s Contextual Robotics Institute, which will customize a variety of vehicles to slowly navigate the roads without the use of a driver.

“We plan to start around January, when we’ll use electric vehicles to pick up mail around campus,” said Henrik Christensen, founding director of the institute. “We may move on to delivering Amazon packages. Right now, people have to come to the center of campus to get them.

“There’s no reason we can’t use self-driving vehicles to deliver things.”


A human monitor will be in the vehicles for the first round of testing. But Christensen is hoping that researchers will move past that point quickly, creating vehicles that are safe, reliable and autonomous.

Christensen has the strong backing of Albert Pisano, dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Pisano said, “The campus is the perfect place for us to develop vehicles that negotiate the right-of-way with people. We have more than 40,000 students and staff on campus every day, and more than 800,000 patients a year visit our medical complex.

“UC San Diego is a microcosm of a city. It’s ideal for this kind of research.”

Such work is popping up at schools across the country. This fall, the University of Michigan will begin limited testing of self-driving shuttles that move people from its North Campus Research Complex to the Lurie Engineering Center.


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