Roads Signs Are As Important To The Future Of Driverless Cars As Artificial Intelligence - ARC

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is critical for the future of the autonomous car. But vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is what will tie everything together. "If we look at it in a very basic level, automated and connected vehicles, to make this happen … it requires an ecosystem to work together," said Tammy Meehan Russell, global portfolio manager for intelligent transportation at 3M. "Very basically that ecosystem is vehicle, human and infrastructure." While visiting the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Center in Ann Arbor, our group of reporters was given a tour of Mcity, a testing and training ground for autonomous, automated and self-driving vehicles. Mcity is a 32-acre artificial town built by MTC and opened in July 2015 for the specific purpose of testing autonomous cars in real world conditions. Just about everything an autonomous car might encounter is represented at Mcity: different kinds of roadways (concrete pavement, grooved pavement etc.), different kinds of road signs and lines, various types of traffic signals, highway conditions, urban conditions and so forth.