From rail to railless: Retrofitting servicing buses for safe autonomous public transportation
Journal
2019 IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems, ICESS 2019
Date Issued
2019
Author(s)
Abstract
Automated/autonomous driving technologies have shown the capability of providing transportation services at certain environments such as small/mid size vehicles on highway and paved roads. However, it remains open to build up an active eco-system to support the development of autonomous driving technologies. This paper presents the development of applying automated/autonomous driving technology on public transportation systems, at which efficiency and safety are two major requirements. The project retrofits a 9-meter engine bus to support SAE level 3/4 automated driving for proof-of-services. In particular, a sensing fusion technology is deployed on the bus to detect objects in three dimension world coordinates. With this technology, the system can provide high capacity transportation systems without rails. The bus has been evaluated in a proof-of-service event. During the 32 days event, the bus served for 253 sorties, which is 20% more than scheduled sorties, and carried more than 7,000 passengers. The proof-of-service showed that the automated driving technology can provide railway-like services without the rails. No infrastructures are required. © 2019 IEEE.
Subjects
And public transportation; Autonomous driving; Sensor fusion
Other Subjects
Automation; Autonomous vehicles; Buses; Embedded software; Embedded systems; Object detection; Retrofitting; Autonomous driving; Fusion technology; Public transportation; Public transportation systems; Sensor fusion; Transportation services; Transportation system; World coordinates; Railroad transportation
Type
conference paper