It is a big step up for autonomous driving from a private campus to full operation on public roads. The UK is providing a helping hand up that step by kitting out 350 kilometers (220 miles) of public roads in its West Midlands district around Birmingham with a full range of self-driving equipment available today, including a 5G network.
The route’s infrastructure also includes CCTV, weather stations, communications units, and GPS.
Called the Midlands Future Mobility project, the twin objectives are to evaluate how well the technology works and to assess the interaction with human drivers during a transition phase from assisted driving to full automation. Effectively the project will assess current capabilities for Level 2 autonomy, where there is automated assistance for steering, accelerating, and braking, as well as Level 3, where complete control can be handed over temporarily to the system under certain conditions.
The new UK test environment, running from Coventry to Birmingham and around the University of Warwick campus, will trial autonomous vehicles on a mix of urban, suburban, and rural roadways, as well as busy interchanges. It will be developed in two phases with urban and suburban routes covered first over 300km of road, followed by rural and major roads coming later in 2020, adding a further 50km.
The project is being run by a consortium including Warwick University, Coventry University, Transport for West Midlands, Highways England, MIRA Technology Park, vehicle testing company ACL, infrastructure company Amey, engineering firm Costain Group, and the Wireless Infrastructure Group. Siemens Mobility is also involved as the primary contractor.
Since these are public roads with no plans for any closures during testing, human test drivers will never relinquish hold of the wheel and will merely assess how the automated system would have performed in their absence. This is almost like Level 3, where drivers can hand over control but be ready to take back over almost instantaneously in the event of an unforeseen event or emergency. One aim is to catalog such exceptions so that they can be addressed through upgrades in the system.
Although complemented by other sensory systems the role of 5G is crucial in providing advanced warning of events or obstacles that may be invisible or beyond line of sight of the driver. This is one factor behind the hope that autonomous vehicles can become much safer than manually driven ones, the other factor being elimination of human error. But to realize this ambition, self-driving systems must become capable themselves of dealing with edge cases, including those it has never encountered before.