LONDON: Jaguar Land Rover is taking to a new British road dedicated to developing connected and autonomous driving systems.
The 66km stretch of road is part of a multi-million-pound investment to accelerate the development of technologies that can cut accidents and reduce congestion. The project will involve a fleet of up to 100 adapted cars including five from Jaguar Land Rover being continuously tested in real-world conditions.
Jaguar Land Rover research and technology director Dr Wolfgang Epple said: "This real-life laboratory will allow Jaguar Land Rover's research team and project partners to test new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies on five different types of roads and junctions."
Initial testing will cover communication between vehicles and road infrastructure such as junctions and traffic lights and will look at the quickest and least distracting ways to bring drivers "over-the-horizon" information about potential problems on the route ahead.
"The benefits of smarter vehicles communicating with each other and their surroundings include a car sending a warning that it is braking heavily or stopping in a queue of traffic or around a bend. This will enable an autonomous car to take direct action and respond. Drivers would receive a visual and audible warning that another car is causing a hazard out of sight or over the horizon," said Dr Epple.
Jaguar also announced a parallel project in partnership with Bosch that will attempt to teach autonomous cars to drive themselves like human rather than robotic drivers.
A fleet of its cars are being given to people who work in the London Borough of Greenwich to learn how real-world drivers react to real-world driving situations.
The data gathered over the ‘MOVE-UK' project's three-year lifespan will also help insurers to determine risk and liability in certain scenarios.
"Understanding how drivers react to a range of very dynamic and random situations in the real world is essential if we want drivers to embrace autonomous cars in the future," explained Dr Epple.
"Drivers will need to completely trust the vehicle before they opt-in and engage automated systems. If an autonomous car can be programmed to have a very similar reaction to a real driver, then the autonomous experience will be more natural, and the driver more likely to allow the car to take control."
