Mini smart city drives design of safer automated transportation

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University engineers have created a 20-by-20-foot “smart” city shrunk to 1:25 scale. Its fleet of custom-built cars, drones, cameras and virtual reality technology are helping researchers design a better – and safer – future for transportation. 

Specifically, the scaled smart city seeks to improve the performance of emerging mobility systems, such as connected and automated vehicles, by enabling small motorized cars to interact with their environment as well as other vehicles, some of which are piloted remotely by humans. Because the city is a controlled environment, experiments can be repeated and results verified. And yet, unpredictability is encouraged.

“If you don’t have an experimental testbed, you use simulation. And simulations are doomed to succeed. They’re always perfect,” said the lab’s director, Andreas Malikopoulos, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “But in the real environment, you have miscommunication, errors, delays, unexpected events. This testbed can give us the opportunity to collect data and extrapolate information, something that we couldn’t do in the real world with real cars, because of safety concerns and the need for resources and space.”

The lab is now on its fifth generation of the vehicles. The team members, many of them undergraduates, take off-the-shelf remote-control cars, gut their RC components and install custom electronics, sensors and Wi-Fi that connects to a mainframe computer. Each vehicle has a unique visual marker so it can be tracked by the testbed’s eight cameras and GPS system. Over the summer, the motor pool expanded to 75 cars and 15 mini drones. The aerial element allows for multiple drones to follow a vehicle and broadcast positioning information, a tactic that could help coordinate mixed traffic, enhance safety and would be particularly valuable for protecting military convoys. 

The students don’t only work on hardware and software. They also get to be in the driver’s seat: The lab has six driver emulators where anyone can sit and “drive” through the scaled city, navigating from their car’s perspective and interacting with other vehicles on the road. The students can even communicate with those driverless vehicles through lab-designed modules that incorporate large language models.

The combination of automated and human-driven vehicles – also known as a cyber-physical system – introduces a level of uncertainty that can help the researchers better understand the ways connected and automated vehicles react in real time. The researchers can then design controllers and algorithms that will improve such responses.

Lab members also have the option of donning a VR headset to drive in a computer-simulated city and experience different traffic scenarios and conditions. The VR system can produce a digital twin of the testbed for more interactive driving.

For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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