This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the acquisition of three connected autonomous microtransit vehicles (CAV) to conduct interdisciplinary research leading to the development, implementation, and validation of advanced transportation solutions. Microtransit vehicles can play a key role in meeting the transportation needs in population-dense areas such as downtowns or campus settings and in mobility-disadvantaged areas. The testbed will be featured in a new course and will enhance CAV-related undergraduate and graduate education. It will also be used to enhance the efforts of the Inclusive Engineering Consortium, K-12 activities for underrepresented groups, and outreach to the broader Greensboro community.
The testbed provides a multi-user configurable research platform that leverages autonomy and transportation research capabilities at NC A&T State University. The instrumentation enables fundamental research on transportation, communications, networks, and real-time systems. The research projects will enable advances in cooperative control of autonomous vehicles, on-demand mobility services to meet distributed demands, validation and autonomy-enabled algorithms for CAVs, testing and fault diagnosis of networked AVs and resilient Vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle to vehicle communication. The CAV testbed provides a catalyst for new regional and national research partnerships with academia, industry, and the national labs to advance research on networks of autonomous vehicles as an important component of public transportation systems.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
