Midlands Future Mobility (MFM)

Focused in the Midlands, the UK’s heart of automotive innovation, Midlands Future Mobility is developing the environment that will play a crucial role in shaping the transport sector. Funded by industrial partners and Government, as part of the wider Meridian Mobility initiative, Midlands Future Mobility will play a crucial role in accelerating technological progress, establishing the UK’s presence in the autonomous vehicle market and contributing to the UK’s Industrial Strategy.

Using real-world environments to trial new vehicles, technologies, and services will introduce the complex and unpredictable situations that cannot be achieved through simulation alone. A network of over 50 miles of roads in Coventry and Warwickshire, and Birmingham, will be optimised to ensure we can gather useful data, measure public interaction, and constantly monitor the technology in action. Covering the most diverse range of roads, junctions and traffic measures in the world, it will also include the University of Warwick campus – a mini city in itself. The tangible benefits of a world where we can enjoy seamless, safe and possibly automated journeys on demand is much closer than we think. The future of mobility will be greener, smarter and safer.

To find out more please visit: https://midlandsfuturemobility.co.uk

Micromobility: The Future of Transport?

Micromobility a UK Roadmap

Powered Micromobility Vehicles (those under ~230kgs unladen weight ) offer a huge opportunity to decarbonise transport, reduce congestion, improve air quality and reduce car dependence. The global market for these vehicles is growing exponentially but the UK is behind in adoption and our vehicle developers have a market share of less than 1% as a result.

Our work has shown that there is support for PMVs across stakeholders when standards are improved and regulations tailored to different vehicle form factors. The proposals outlined pave the way for the UK to realise the benefits of PMVs, and to move from laggards to leaders in this field. The key finding is that one-size does not fit all when it comes to the needs of, and sensible rules for future PMVs. Around key factors such as the minimum age of users and a maximum speed of these vehicles, there is variation in what is considered appropriate from one form factor to another, and legislation must cater for this. Work undertaken by WMG at the University of Warwick with Cenex, supported by TRL and the MCIA over the last year has formed a timeline of actions (Figure 3) which sees the first new PMV type on UK roads as early as mid-2023, with two new types following behind after consultation and trials respectively.

The "Micromobility a UK Roadmap" document sets out proposals which will address these issues, unleashing Micromobility innovation in the UK. The full document can be viewed here: Micromobility a UK Roadmap

West Midlands E-scooter Trial

Micromobility has the potential to revolutionise the way people move around the UK. From electric scooters to electric bikes, micromobility solutions can provide convenient sustainable transport for last-mile journeys, significantly reducing traffic congestion and air pollution.

In June 2020, the UK announced the first nationwide trial of e-scooters. This 12 month trial of rental e-scooters will be used to study the impact of e-scooters. Following this, in September 2020, Voi Technology, a Swedish based micromobility company, won the West Midlands tender, which includes: Coventry, Birmingham, Sandwell (West Bromwich), Solihull, Walsall, Warwickshire, and Wolverhampton.

University of Warwick E-scooter Study

With e-scooter rental services, the approach is seemingly follow the leader. The top five e-scooter service providers and manufacturers are offering the same basic product/service. However, based on our research, we anticipate that in the near future, we will see further innovation on the design of e-scooters, much in the same way skateboard designs changed in the 1990s. This could include adding suspension, more wheels, longer wheelbase, wider wheelbase, larger deck, longer handles, etc.

For further information about the research being carried out at WMG, please contact Dr Roger Woodman

RACeD

The RACeD, or Research for Advanced Concept Development, Doctorate Programme is a project funded by JLR with five Engineering Doctorate researchers investigating specific JLR research challenges. They will collectively advance JLR’s pathway to building up smart, connected and autonomous technology capability.

Evaluating the Self-Learning Car in the Simulated and Real-World
The future self learning car must consider what features customers will want, what they will need and what features are worth automating. Perhaps most importantly we must consider how technology such as electric vehicles and self-driving cars will affect these user requirements. To this end, the direction of the research points towards the development of a future-proof framework for development of self-learning and autonomous features within vehicles.

Predicting Pedestrian Movement using external perception sensors
In order to safely navigate a complex environment human drivers will observe their surroundings and make predictions on likely future states. Human drivers are able to create relatively complex predictions of other humans behaviour based on a complex set of information including features such as the local geography, body pose, face direction etc. Anecdotally many drivers can attest to being able to tell whether a pedestrian is planning to cross in front of them or not just by looking at them. Autonomous or semi autonomous vehicles currently lack this complex prediction model, instead relying on simpler prediction models more prone to false positives. As higher level autonomous vehicles become more common it is important for them to be able to smoothly interact with pedestrians. As such this project aims to explore whether a machine learning algorithm, utilising automotive sensors, can be trained to produce a more accurate prediction model for pedestrian movement when compared with current human designed models.

A User-in-the-Loop Test Methodology for Wireless Network Services in Vehicles
The study will provide answers to industry’s nonstandard use cases such as how much complexity is added when investigating connected services for a moving car as opposed to a static car and how important are the user(s) activities for the in-car communication channel. The main objective of the project is to create a general model of the relationship between the wireless network parameters measured inside a moving car, possibly including its user interactions. This model will be useful as a prediction tool for assessing the perceived quality of in-car connected services.

Keeping the Driver Aware in a Semi Autonomous Car
What happens if a self driving car needs to hand back control to the driver, but the driver is distracted or unaware? This is a potentially challenging situation for the driver, vehicle and other road users alike. The research question is ‘How best can the car interact with the driver to keep them aware whilst the car is self-driving?’ This design challenge is the focus of this research, and is split into three key areas: Safety, Interfaces and testing.

On-Board and Off-Board Data
In the automotive industry, there is a strong trend toward an increased data output from the Electronic Control Units (ECU) in order to enable more complex features. This presents challenges that include: the bandwidth and topology constraints of the In-vehicle Network (IVN); the bandwidth and latency of wireless communication platforms (2G/3G/4G LTE) and the inability to effectively store, process and query the available information wherever it is needed. In order to make the most effective use of this data, this project aims to research techniques that can assist with data transfer and management between the On-Board and Off-Board systems.

Travel Choices and Wellbeing

We live in hypermobile societies where high involvement in mobility is required to stay active and well connected to society, such as friends and family, shops and services etc., and hence being mobile has a relationship with quality of life. Transport was and will continue to remain a critical enabler for economic and social progress, however health and wellbeing is a critical factor that needs to be emphasised. Transport as an indicator of wellbeing is increasingly important for modern societies, as it relates to opportunities, jobs, housing, healthcare, etc. for participating societies. Therefore, it is essential to focus on the transport element for wellbeing, in order to develop sustainable policies for positive behaviour change with the arrival of new technologies.

There is already a huge momentum, awareness and will to change to clean mobility in the transport industry, however, it is time that we think about sustainable transport from a more people-centric, inclusive and holistic approach. Many targets are already there, but the achievability roadmap from a consumer-centric perspective is missing, which results in the gap between the actual on-ground numbers and the targets set by the government or OEMs. After all, it is for the people and by the people that these initiatives need to be accepted and adopted to be able to tackle this common goal of climate change. With proper research, we hope to achieve a vision for an inclusive, traditionally sustainable, affordable, and holistic mobility system where we march towards a healthier and happier society.

Shravani Sharma in Conversation – Part 1

The impact of climate change on transport planning, being a bicycle councillor, transport behaviour change, transport policies and lack of communication between policy makers and users, travel priorities in developing countries and issues with multiple car ownership.

SWARM

Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles have been hard to miss in the news recently, whether this be Tesla's partially automated 'Auto Pilot' feature, or the fully driverless 'pods' that arrived on the streets of Milton Keynes in October 2016.

As the technology becomes more familiar, people are becoming increasingly confident that individual vehicles will be able to drive and navigate themselves on roads and around people. But a single self-driving car is of limited value, it needs to work as part of an existing transport system – therefore conversations are now moving towards ‘how will they actually work in a city network’. Currently one pod can move one person (maybe two if sharing), but it needs a trained safety driver to be in the vehicle, plus traffic cameras to monitor its every move and to make sure it does what is expected.

This is expensive, so to make autonomous urban transport more efficient - while maintaining safety - we need to share this supervision between the pods and external systems (cameras and humans). We aim to achieve this by using Swarm Intelligence (what bees or ants do when part of a colony) to enable real-time, collaborative supervision of pods – meaning individual pods are locally supervised, not only by cameras or humans, but by neighbouring pods in the Swarm colony.

Multi-objective Optimisation of Pod Fleet

Technology inspired by ‘Mother Nature’ is being developed to help manage fleets of driverless pods. The concept is based on fusing together existing information from other vehicles in the fleet to allow each pod to locally decide the most appropriate action for the group as a whole – similar to how insects and birds currently behave. This means that pods can highlight any unexpected behaviour to a supervisor, as well as giving local authorities the chance to take advantage of ‘platooning’, where vehicles follow each other when possible to minimise the number or individual vehicle movements. The technology also makes the system automatically adapt its behaviour to meet demand so that pods can be optimally distributed within a city to the areas where they are most likely.

Co-simulation of Autonomous Vehicles

This project will use WMG’s ‘3xD simulator for Intelligent Vehicles’ in order to conduct remote co-simulations between a simulated pod and a physical pod, located at RDMs Urban Development Lab).