Texas A&M leading project to test autonomous vehicles on rural roads

Texas A&M is playing a leading role in expanding the capabilities of automated vehicles and investigating how they can be safely used on rural roads. The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) was recently awarded $7 million in federal grant funding from the Department of Transportation (DOT). In partnership with researchers from George Washington University and the University of California-Davis, A&M professors will be studying the specifics of how automated vehicles work on rural roadways -- something Alireza Talebpour, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said not much is currently known about. "Autonomous vehicle testing has pretty much only been done in urban centers," Talebpour said. "The technology is useless if it only works in big cities – the majority of roads in the United States are rural. We want to enable autonomous driving for people who don't live in big cities."