{"id":11453,"date":"2017-01-30T06:13:27","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T06:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=11453"},"modified":"2017-01-30T06:13:27","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T06:13:27","slug":"wisconsin-proving-ground-paves-way-driverless-vehicle-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wisconsin-proving-ground-paves-way-driverless-vehicle-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisconsin proving ground paves way for driverless vehicle research"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Autonomous vehicles range from interstate freight trucks down to small people-carriers \u2014 like the Navya Arma \u2014 that may prove useful on Wisconsin Proving Ground sites like campuses at UW\u2013Madison or Epic Systems in Verona. COURTESY OF UW\u2013MADISON\/TOPS LAB<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A partnership including University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison engineers has been named one of 10 proving grounds for driverless cars and trucks by the U.S. Department of Transportation.<\/p>\n

The future of transportation undoubtedly includes vehicles that operate with little or no input from human operators, according to Peter Rafferty<\/a>, a program manager at UW\u2013Madison\u2019s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory<\/a> (TOPS). Outgoing Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who announced the proving grounds last week, expects them to serve as a network of pooled expertise to speed the safe deployment of driverless vehicles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are still a lot of questions of safety and human interaction and plenty of technological challenges that need addressing,\u201d says Rafferty. \u201cThe Department of Transportation wants to make sure the lessons learned in that work are being shared, and being involved in this network means Wisconsin has access to that knowledge and an opportunity to contribute.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Peter Rafferty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The TOPS Lab, in the UW\u2013Madison College of Engineering, and Akron, New York-based MGA Research led an effort to gather space and expertise to attract researchers testing autonomous vehicles (AVs) in all sorts of conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAV technology in development ranges from one- and two-person vehicles and small buses for local trips up to platoons of trucks driving in tandem on the interstate,\u201d Rafferty says. \u201cWe have places to test most or all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Wisconsin AV Proving Grounds includes MGA\u2019s Burlington site \u2014 400 acres of roadways and crash-testing facilities originally built as a proving ground for American Motors cars \u2014 and the 4-mile racing circuit at Road America in Plymouth provide secure environments for AV testing. The sprawling headquarters of Epic Systems in Verona and UW\u2013Madison\u2019s own streets are also included in the proving grounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s evidence of unmet demand for these proving grounds \u2014 controlled roads where you can safely challenge a vehicle and figure out how to make it react differently to a big rock in its way than it would to a shopping bag in the street or to tell the difference between the ruts that develop in new snow and broken pavement,\u201d says Rafferty.<\/p>\n

Madison roads, Wisconsin highways and the campus layout at UW\u2013Madison and Epic would pose more public and realistically interactive situations for driverless vehicles.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn intersection in the middle of campus at class-changing time is a completely different \u2014 but equally important \u2014 set of challenges to address,\u201d Rafferty says.<\/p>\n

Rafferty and the City of Madison are interested in the way the vehicles could be deployed to better connect people who cannot afford or otherwise operate their own cars to public transit and vital services like health care. Industry users of the proving grounds could also draw on UW\u2013Madison experts in data collection, high-resolution mapping, computer and vehicle networking, and engine and power production.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are all kinds of concepts in formulation, and I really want to get those vehicles here to start working on proving their capabilities and user acceptance,\u201d Rafferty says. \u201cAnd because we have this commitment to infrastructure, we can get them going here for thousands of dollars instead of millions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A partnership including University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison engineers has been named one of 10 proving grounds for driverless cars and trucks by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The future of transportation undoubtedly includes vehicles that operate with little or no input from human operators, according to Peter Rafferty, a program manager at UW\u2013Madison\u2019s Traffic Operations and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-techbiz"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",775,517,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517-768x512.jpg",750,500,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",750,500,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",775,517,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",775,517,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",775,517,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",775,517,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",735,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",540,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",640,427,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Navya_Arma_interior-775x517.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Tech<\/a>","tag_info":"Tech","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}