Motivation
Autonomous vehicles (AV) have developed at a rapid pace recently, however a safe infrastructure for AV’s has received less attention. While the vehicle industry has greatly advanced its understanding of AVs, the safety and operational requirements of the accompanying road infrastructure and the impact of AVs in civil and transportation engineering networks require a similar investment in research.
Project Ideas
As a result of brainstorming sessions and consultations with external partners, five topic areas have been formed: 1) Road design (certain design aspects related to intersections, cross-section and road sections); 2) Detection and perception (road work zones, traffic calming devices, road edges, road markings, and traffic signs); 3) Pavement design (implications of AVs on pavement design); 4) Vulnerable road users (communication and behavioral adaptation); 5) Miscellaneous topics (e.g. traffic conflict analysis).
We plan to use a variety of approaches to investigate these ideas; some will be researched in depth by PhD students while others may be better suited as short-term graduate thesis topics. Some of the ideas are already being investigated, they are green-coloured in the mind-map below, for further information please see them under on-going research. The majority of these on-going activities are PhD researches. This project lasts for five years (June 2019 – May 2024), along the way we expect other PhD students to join our team. Thus, the topics being investigated will be dynamically changing.
