The Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at Warwick University is to start trials for driverless pods, with help from a high resolution laser scanning a 30 mile area of Coventry’s roads. The IIDAR scan will give a WMG research team the opportunity to conduct safe trials in a 3D simulator while accurately mimicking real-world conditions. According to WMG’s Professor Paul Jennings, “effectively we can take some of the risks out of real-world trials, and learn things much more quickly.”
Professor Paul Jennings from WMG at the University of Warwick said:
“The vehicles will be tested on a state of the art simulator we have just installed in WMG. It will use a LIDAR scan (essentially a high resolution laser scan of an environment) of 30 miles of real roads around the City of Coventry to the test vehicles in the simulator.
“The simulator can be configured so that different vehicles can be driven into it for testing, and the real world wireless environment will be recreated too. We believe both will be novel capabilities for such an advanced simulator.”
David Keene, Chairman of RDM Group, said: “It is fantastic that we have such advanced simulation technology at our disposal to analyse how driverless vehicles will react before being deployed in the real world.
“It will speed up the testing process considerably and help with the positioning of the sensors on the pods. Yet another example of how university and industry can work together to put the region and the country at the forefront of driverless technology.”
