TAIPEI, Taiwan — Rolling with a barely audible hum beneath banyan trees, a brightly painted shuttle bus cruised through a university campus here.

The electric vehicle crawled along at a speed of no more than six miles per hour. And only 12 passengers could fit inside. But the bus also drove itself, raising hopes in Taipei that autonomous public transportation would be up and running here within a year.

“The idea of one day being able to ride around this city in driverless vehicles is quite exciting,” said Amber Chen, who was riding with her son Ruey-She, 8.

The bus tests are partly to prove that the autonomous-driving technology is safe to deploy on the city’s busy streets, and partly to gather the data needed to improve the artificial intelligence that steer such vehicles. The effort, one of the earliest in Asia, could help position Taiwan as both a pioneer in autonomous public transportation and, if things go according to plan, a producer of driverless buses.