The next time you get stuck behind a car dutifully obeying the speed limit, it may soon be driving itself. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently granted researchers at UW-Madison approval to pursue the testing of driverless cars at sites around the state.
The university’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory is lacking any driverless cars, called “autonomous vehicles,” of their own. To develop and test the technology, the lab must partner with a company interested in testing driverless cars.
If such a partner is found, “there's no reason why we couldn't be months away” from testing driverless cars around the state, a researcher in the lab, Peter Rafferty, told the Wisconsin State Journal.
The step after the establishment of a partnership and initial development is for researchers to begin to test the emerging technology at various sites around Wisconsin.
Vehicles in the early stages of testing would operate solely on closed test facilities, to ensure readiness of testing at the next level of sites: streets around UW-Madison and the Epic Systems campus in Verona.
The most advanced of the vehicles would eventually be tested on city streets around Madison and the state’s highway system.
Researchers intend to perform thorough testing of the technology prior to allowing autonomous vehicles’ interaction with public streets and highways. “Safety really is an underlying, fundamental priority of all of this,” Rafferty said.
Utilizing a combination of GPS, cameras and laser-sensing detection systems, the researchers intend to develop driverless cars as a safer alternative to standard cars by removing human error as a contributor to mistakes, inattention and drunk driving.
