IN the race to deploy driverless public transport, Singapore has built a mini town that could vault it into pole position.
The 2-hectare complex, unveiled last November, has intersections, traffic lights, bus stops and pedestrian crossings, all built to the specifications that Singapore uses for its public roads. There’s a mini hill to check how vehicle sensors perform when they can’t see directly ahead, mock skyscrapers to mimic the radio interference from tall buildings and a rain machine to simulate the island’s frequent tropical downpours.
The advantage for the city-state is that the test circuit, and the information provided by companies vying to put driverless buses on Singapore’s streets, is helping it build an unrivaled database of information on the challenges and solutions that would allow the government to introduce the technology safely.
“We’re probably the only country that’s looking at this in such a proactive and systematic way,” said Lee Chuan Teck, former deputy secretary at the Ministry of Transport. “What we’re looking at is actually deploying regulations.”
Lee said the data being gathered should allow the government to draft regulations for autonomous vehicles by the second half of this year. The nation’s small size, advanced road infrastructure and highly regulated traffic system make it an ideal petri dish for companies that are developing driverless systems.
There are now more than 10 companies testing vehicles at the facility at Nanyang Technological University in the west of Singapore, said Niels de Boer, program director for Future Mobility Solutions at the university. Two buses from Volvo AB will join them early next year and more are coming, he said.
With so many hazards and intersections on the route, the speed limit at the site is about 20 to 25 kilometers an hour. De Boer said that they want to see what happens under a “controlled environment.”
Seven 360-degree cameras stream live video to the Land Transport Authority’s Intelligent Transport Systems Centre downtown. Together with information collected from the vehicles, the government is building a database that will allow it to evaluate whether EVs, electric vehicles, are ready for public roads and how they should be deployed.
Nanyang Technological University is testing a 15 passenger driverless minibus built by French company Navya SAS, which researchers can operate using the autonomous software, or manually via a video-game style handset.
On a recent, hot morning, it trundled round the course with air conditioning on full, cutting its seven-hour battery life in half. The bus navigated lanes, halted in front of a wayward pedestrian in the road and stopped at bus shelters to collect and deliver passengers, though some functions, such as moving off at traffic lights, still had to be manually initiated. On one occasion, it made an emergency stop for some unseen obstacle, throwing passengers onto the floor. The only place the bus didn’t go was the rain simulator, which de Boer said wasn’t working after being damaged in a recent thunderstorm.