On July 20, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor opened Mcity, a 32-acre simulated urban and suburban controlled environment, designed specifically to test the potential of connected and automated vehicle technologies.
The $6.5 million project comprises a five-mile stretch of roads, some of them up to five lanes. Mcity includes rearrangeable architecture such as buildings, streetlights, parked cars, traffic lights and stop signs, sidewalks, and other obstacles. Robotic pedestrians and mechanized bikes roam throughout Mcity.
The miniature city is developed and designed by the university’s two-year-old Interdisciplinary Mobility Transformation Center, a partnership of several automotive companies, the Michigan Department of Transportation, researchers from UM’s Transportation Research Institute, and its College of Engineering.
“The initiative demonstrates the great potential in working with partners outside the University to address compelling issues of broad impact,” said UM’s president Mark Schlissel. NPR reports that 15 companies, which include Ford, GM, and Nissan, paid $1 million each to help build Mcity.
Companies like Google, Toyota, Uber, and Apple have been working on self-driving technologies that rely on GPS, radar and remote sensors known as LIDAR. So far the test results have been impressive, albeit in a limited sense. Experts anticipate that driverless streets and highways could be a common reality within the next 10 to 15 years. The real challenge, though, is getting driverless cars to react to and interact with how humans drive.
Google, which began its self-driving project in 2009, currently averages 10,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets. Over six years of testing through May 2015, its driverless vehicles had been involved in 12 minor accidents during more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined. “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” claims Google in a recent progress report. However, Google’s test cars rarely go beyond 25 miles per hour and so far have been limited to roads the car’s computers have already analyzed.
As the New York Times reported earlier this month, autonomous vehicles right now are programmed to drive overly cautiously, compared with humans’ typically aggressive driving habits. Autonomous cars “have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture,” Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab and the University of California, San Diego was quoted as saying.
Mcity, then, provides a testing ground for driverless cars in unpredictable conditions.
“There are many challenges ahead as automated vehicles are increasingly deployed on real roadways,” explains Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Mobility Transformation Center. “Mcity is a safe, controlled and realistic environment where we are going to figure out how the incredible potential of connected and automated vehicles can be realized quickly, efficiently and safely.”
NPR quotes university researchers who are hoping to have 20 to 30 automated cars driving around Ann Arbor’s streets within the next six years.
Related Stories
University Buildings | Apr 24, 2023
Solving complicated research questions in interdisciplinary facilities
University and life science project owners should consider the value of more collaborative building methods, close collaboration with end users, and the benefits of partners who can leverage sector-specific knowledge to their advantage.
Green | Apr 21, 2023
Top 10 green building projects for 2023
The Harvard University Science and Engineering Complex in Boston and the Westwood Hills Nature Center in St. Louis are among the AIA COTE Top Ten Awards honorees for 2023.
K-12 Schools | Apr 18, 2023
ASHRAE offers indoor air quality guide for schools
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has released a guide for educators, administrators, and school districts on indoor air quality. The guide can be used as a tool to discuss options to improve indoor air quality based on existing HVAC equipment, regional objectives, and available funding.
K-12 Schools | Apr 13, 2023
Creating a sense of place with multipurpose K-12 school buildings
Multipurpose buildings serve multiple program and functional requirements. The issue with many of these spaces is that they tend not to do any one thing well.
Urban Planning | Apr 12, 2023
Watch: Trends in urban design for 2023, with James Corner Field Operations
Isabel Castilla, a Principal Designer with the landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, discusses recent changes in clients' priorities about urban design, with a focus on her firm's recent projects.
Market Data | Apr 11, 2023
Construction crane count reaches all-time high in Q1 2023
Toronto, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Denver top the list of U.S/Canadian cities with the greatest number of fixed cranes on construction sites, according to Rider Levett Bucknall's RLB Crane Index for North America for Q1 2023.
University Buildings | Apr 11, 2023
Supersizing higher education: Tracking the rise of mega buildings on university campuses
Mega buildings on higher education campuses aren’t unusual. But what has been different lately is the sheer number of supersized projects that have been in the works over the last 12–15 months.
Contractors | Apr 10, 2023
What makes prefabrication work? Factors every construction project should consider
There are many factors requiring careful consideration when determining whether a project is a good fit for prefabrication. JE Dunn’s Brian Burkett breaks down the most important considerations.
Smart Buildings | Apr 7, 2023
Carnegie Mellon University's research on advanced building sensors provokes heated controversy
A research project to test next-generation building sensors at Carnegie Mellon University provoked intense debate over the privacy implications of widespread deployment of the devices in a new 90,000-sf building. The light-switch-size devices, capable of measuring 12 types of data including motion and sound, were mounted in more than 300 locations throughout the building.
Architects | Apr 6, 2023
New tool from Perkins&Will will make public health data more accessible to designers and architects
Called PRECEDE, the dashboard is an open-source tool developed by Perkins&Will that draws on federal data to identify and assess community health priorities within the U.S. by location. The firm was recently awarded a $30,000 ASID Foundation Grant to enhance the tool.