Major self-driving car projects are heading to Ohio via new collaboration

Intel subsidiary Wind River has announced a new collaboration with The Ohio State University, Transportation Research Center, and the City of Dublin in Ohio to further progress with self-driving cars and related autonomous technologies. The collaboration will happen in the Columbus region, according to a statement from Wind River, and will involve, among other things, testing 'emerging technologies' with the goal of figuring out how these cars can be used alongside infrastructure for the betterment of communities.

The planned collaboration will include the testing of communication between both vehicles with other vehicles and vehicles with nearby infrastructure. The team will also work with related technologies, such as smart sensing, smart mapping, and connected cockpit software, as well as the data collection necessary for these technologies to work best.

Overall, Wind River explains that the collaboration's main goal for its initial phase will be both the development and the testing of self-driving cars that they call rolling laboratories. An important part of the collaboration and testing will involve the 33 Smart Corridor, a span of 35 miles of highway that run between East Liberty north of Columbus and the city of Dublin. This area is being fitted with high-capacity fiber optic cable so that researchers can get data from sensors positioned along the road.

The fiber optic is being installed by the state's Department of Transportation, which is one part of many who are working together to further these technologies. Wind River explains that this corridor will be a vital part of testing autonomous technologies that will eventually go live on roads around the world. Also utilized with be the Transportation Research Center's 7.5-mile high-speed oval and its 4,500 acres of road courses.

Wind River's Marques McCammon discussed the new collaboration recently, saying:

The Central Ohio region is an emerging hub for smart city and smart vehicle technologies, and our unique ensemble approach—uniting minds from academia, the public sector, and the tech industry—can set a standard for how communities can innovate mobility and use the learnings to impact vehicle development and deployment best practices. To realize autonomous driving for the masses, a variety of players must come together with an aligned understanding.

SOURCE: Wind River