Driverless vehicle carrying passengers using intelligent transport systems technology
Research_

Intelligent transport systems

We're driving the development of new transport systems
We're transforming the way we move people and goods around in cities, while improving the productivity, liveability, safety and sustainability of our communities.

The mobility and transportation of people and goods is one of the fundamental pillars of the world economy. The constant increase in demand to current transportation systems has created fundamental problems that current approaches can no longer address.

This is clearly seen by the continuing increase in congestion and the level of pollution that are present in highly dynamic cities. It’s widely recognised that we’re on the verge of a significant disruptive change in the way we provide mobility.

We see three main technologies that will be massively deployed in the next few years as vehicle electrification, driverless technology, and car sharing.

Our research spans various autonomous vehicle technologies, including:

  • autonomous vehicle platforms
  • perception
  • vision based semantic deep learning
  • localisation
  • path planning and provably safe trajectories
  • driver/pedestrian intention estimation
  • cooperative perception

Our research

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborators: ibeo Automotive, Nvidea

We're working with Ibeo Automotive on urban perception and have developed a ground sensor vehicle with lasers and navigation sensors that collect naturalistic driving data for autonomous vehicle research.

We have also established a program with Nvidia and are working with their automotive computers graphic processing units (GPU’s) to navigate using deep learning algorithms.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborators: Group Renault Regienov

We're collaborating with Group Renault Regienov in France in a number of projects related to autonomous urban vehicles. These projects include the monitoring and data logging of navigation and perception data, learning driver behaviours, and maintenance of navigation maps. These projects are part of a collaboration with the Renault group that have been running for over 10 years.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Stewart Worrall, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Karan Narula

We're one of the partners of the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre that received a $55 million grant from the federal government. The group has begun collaborations with automotive companies regarding vehicle-to-vehicle communications and autonomy areas.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: IAG

One of the fundamental aspects that will need to be addressed for the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AV) is the standardisation of safety assurance. That is, what are the requirements that an AV must satisfy and how to verify these requirements.

We're developing the algorithms and techniques to design and evaluate safety metrics that can assure safety in a particular operation design domain (ODD). The project will look at characterising uncertainty in perception and control to be used with safety metrics to evaluate the level of safety and perform risk assessment of connected and automated vehicles in well-defined domains.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: Cohda Wireless

The deployment of Dedicated short range communications (DSRC) technology will enable the sharing of a multitude of information, that can potentially be used to build very accurate representations of the local environment. 

Our project aims at developing the fundamental cooperative framework to enable a number of commercial applications of this technology. These applications will be able to operate from day one by providing safety benefit in low DSRC penetration markets and will become essential components for the deployment of autonomous vehicles.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Karan Narula, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: Transport for NSW 

With self-driving cars becoming increasingly prevalent on our roads, it is critical we understand how new technology should work as part of an integrated transport network to maximise safety, mobility and efficiency benefits for society.

The project will undertake research into customer-focused safe operation of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in various urban environments with cooperative intelligent transport systems (ITS) to improve road user safety and inform our partner Transport for NSW of the network readiness for automated mobility.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: Transport for NSW 

This project aims to develop the fundamental science to enable the implementation and understanding of the interaction between connected and automated vehicles (CAV) and vulnerable road users, in this case mainly pedestrians.

We intend to develop intelligent algorithms to infer pedestrian position and intentions. It will use multiple sources of information provided by different sensing modalities installed in the vehicles and intelligent infrastructure.

This will provide our partner Transport for NSW with valuable experimentation results to enable them to evaluate the potential implication and benefits of this new technology. It will also highlight the importance of intelligent infrastructure to improve safety outcomes for road users.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Karan Narula, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborators: Ford Motors Company, University of Michigan

This project involves a number of researchers and PhD students from the University of Sydney and Michigan University working together to address the automation challenges of the next generation of urban vehicles. It is examining various aspects of autonomous vehicles including perception, mapping and decision and control.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: European Commission

We're one of two external partners for the BRAVE project funded by the European Commission and part of the Horizon 2020 Program. We're collaborating with the University of Alcala in the area of driver intention and safe interaction between manual and autonomous vehicles.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Dr Mao Shan, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our collaborator: Applied Electric Vehicles

In the future we will likely see a transition from hydrocarbon-based engines to electric motors and battery technologies, as well as vehicle automation and driverless technology. These technologies provide efficient, zero-emission transportation. It’s believed that shared driverless electric vehicles could dramatically improve vehicle utilisation rates, providing continuous point-to-point transportation.

We're leading the charge in deploying autonomous electric vehicle technology. This includes the development and demonstration of new mobility within a university campus environment, which has the potential to revolutionise travel around the university and influence future building development and campus infrastructure.

Our experts: Professor Eduardo Nebot, Associate Professor Martin Tomitsch, Dr Stewart Worrall

Our project aims to understand the link between trust, safety, and the public acceptance of driverless cars. The uptake of autonomous mobility systems relies upon public trust and unfortunat injuries have highlighted the risks they pose to pedestrians in particular.

We are investigating new interfaces for improving public trust and pedestrian safety by allowing vehicles to communicate with the people around them. Along the way, we will develop a validated approach for simulating real interactions with autonomous vehicles in a virtual-reality environment.

Benefits of this research include strategies for making driverless cars safer for pedestrians and a new approach for testing solutions to this emerging problem in a low-cost, low-risk way.

Our experts: Professor Salah Sukkarieh

Our collaborator: Qantas Airways

We developed novel flight planning algorithms and supporting software systems that are helping Qantas Airways to deliver fuel and carbon saving via optimal routing of aircraft. This project concluded in 2017 with the handover of software to Qantas for operations.