MRI: Acquisition of a Testbed of Connected Autonomous MicroTransit Vehicles

该主要研究仪器（MRI）奖支持购买三辆连接的自动微型交通车辆（CAV），以进行跨学科研究，从而开发、实施和验证先进的交通解决方案。微型交通工具在满足市中心或校园等人口密集地区以及交通不便地区的交通需求方面可以发挥关键作用。该试验台将作为一门新课程的特色，并将加强与cav相关的本科和研究生教育。它还将用于加强包容性工程联盟的努力，为代表性不足的群体提供K-12活动，并扩大到更广泛的格林斯博罗社区。该试验台提供了一个多用户可配置的研究平台，充分利用了北卡罗来纳a&t州立大学的自主和交通研究能力。该仪器可用于交通、通信、网络和实时系统的基础研究。这些研究项目将推动自动驾驶汽车的协同控制、满足分布式需求的按需移动服务、自动驾驶汽车的验证和自动驾驶算法、联网自动驾驶汽车的测试和故障诊断，以及弹性车对基础设施和车对车通信等方面的进展。CAV测试平台为与学术界、工业界和国家实验室建立新的区域和国家研究伙伴关系提供了催化剂，以推进自动驾驶汽车网络作为公共交通系统重要组成部分的研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the acquisition of three connected autonomous microtransit vehicles (CAV) to conduct interdisciplinary research leading to the development, implementation, and validation of advanced transportation solutions. Microtransit vehicles can play a key role in meeting the transportation needs in population-dense areas such as downtowns or campus settings and in mobility-disadvantaged areas. The testbed will be featured in a new course and will enhance CAV-related undergraduate and graduate education. It will also be used to enhance the efforts of the Inclusive Engineering Consortium, K-12 activities for underrepresented groups, and outreach to the broader Greensboro community.The testbed provides a multi-user configurable research platform that leverages autonomy and transportation research capabilities at NC A&T State University. The instrumentation enables fundamental research on transportation, communications, networks, and real-time systems. The research projects will enable advances in cooperative control of autonomous vehicles, on-demand mobility services to meet distributed demands, validation and autonomy-enabled algorithms for CAVs, testing and fault diagnosis of networked AVs and resilient Vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle to vehicle communication. The CAV testbed provides a catalyst for new regional and national research partnerships with academia, industry, and the national labs to advance research on networks of autonomous vehicles as an important component of public transportation systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.