8 Jul 2020
New £1m research project in partnership with Highways England to prepare the UK’s motorways for self-driving vehicles
The School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering at Loughborough University is teaming up with Highways England on a new £1m project to prepare the UK's motorways for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs).
The project named CAVIAR (Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: Infrastructure Appraisal Readiness) was announced as a winner in Highways England’s innovation and air quality competition last year and awarded £1m from the government company’s innovation and modernisation designated fund.
CAVIAR is being carried out in partnership with Galliford Try, ensuring that CAVs are safe to operate on motorways by evaluating how road layouts and construction zones affect their operational boundaries, such as their ability to sense lanes and make appropriate decisions.
Loughborough will lead the work on the development and validation of the simulation platform. The team from the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering is led by Professor Mohammed Quddus, and also includes Dr Craig Morton, Dr Alkis Papadoulis, Nicolette Formosa, Cansu Masera and Jacky Man.
Professor Quddus said:
"Our vision is to deliver a world-leading experimental and simulated platform for assessing motorway infrastructure readiness level for CAV operations underpinned by the sciences of AI, statistics, optimisation and verification to realise the UK Government target of having self-driving vehicles on UK roads by 2021.
We will instrument a vehicle with a plethora of sensors including lidar, radars, cameras, GPS, and V2X communication facility to collect real-world motorway operational data and integrate them with MIDAS (Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling) data to validate and verify the simulation platform in evaluating different aspects of CAV infrastructure readiness."
